Indonesian breadfruit simmered in coconut milk with dark palm sugar and pandan until glossy and the sauce is thick, eaten warm or cold, and above all to break the fast in Ramadan
Origin: Ambon & the Moluccas
From the journey of Breadfruit.
Kolak is one of the fixed points of the Indonesian year: a pot of fruit or tubers simmered in coconut milk with gula aren or gula jawa, the dark sugar of the palm, and scented with pandan, which a great many households eat to break the fast at sunset in Ramadan. Banana is the commonest filling, with sweet potato, cassava, and pumpkin close behind. Breadfruit, sukun, makes one of the best, because its dense flesh takes up the sweetened milk without collapsing. Indonesia keeps the two forms of the fruit apart in its vocabulary. Sukun is the seedless breadfruit; keluwih or kluwih is the seeded breadnut, whose young fruit is cooked as a vegetable in Javanese sayur asem. The distinction is old. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, the German-born naturalist in Dutch service who spent most of his life on Ambon, described the breadfruits of the Moluccas in his Herbarium Amboinense, written in the second half of the seventeenth century and published only between 1741 and 1750, long after his death. He separated a seedless form, Soccus lanosus, from a seeded one, Soccus granosus, and from a wild relative, and the modern reading of his names by Pablo Ferrer-Gallego and Fernando Boisset equates them with breadfruit, the breadnut, and the wild Moluccan Artocarpus horridus.
Banana, sweet potato, and cassava can be added to the same pot, and often are. The salt is not optional: a pinch is what makes palm sugar and coconut taste of themselves.
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