Seychellois Breadfruit Chips

Thin slices of mature breadfruit fried crisp and salted, the snack of the Seychelles beaches and roadsides, where the fruit is friyapen

Origin: Victoria, Mahé & the Seychelles

From the journey of Breadfruit.

In Seychellois Creole breadfruit is friyapen, from the French fruit à pain, and it is as close to a national food as the islands have. It is boiled, roasted in the embers, mashed, cooked in ladob with coconut milk (sweet with vanilla and nutmeg, or savoury with salt fish), and above all sliced thin and fried into chips, which are sold in bags from shop counters and roadside stalls all over Mahé. A saying that visitors hear early holds that whoever eats breadfruit in the Seychelles will come back. How and when the tree arrived is not recorded. The islands were uninhabited until French settlers came from Île de France, the present Mauritius, in 1770, and the breadfruits of the Mascarenes were close at hand: Pierre Sonnerat had the seeded tree growing on Réunion and Mauritius from 1772, and the gardener Félix Lahaie delivered seedless trees from Tonga to the botanical garden at Pamplemousses in 1797. The seedless fruit that the Seychelles now eats most probably came by that road, but the record does not say. The chips are also a modern industry. A 2007 paper by A.-M. Moustache and M. Moustache describes how the Seychelles' Cottage Industry Act spurred so much small-scale chip-making that the supply of fruit could not keep up, and how breadfruit had been written into the national agricultural strategy of 1992–93 as a traditional food crop to be conserved and replanted.

Ingredients

  • 1 mature breadfruit, firm and starchy (about 1 kg)
  • 1 tbsp salt, for the soaking water
  • 1 l coconut or vegetable oil, for deep frying
  • 1.5 tsp fine salt, to season

Method

  1. Oil a knife, peel the breadfruit, cut it into quarters, and cut out the core.
  2. Slice the quarters as thinly as you can, about 2 mm, on a mandoline if you have one.
  3. Soak the slices in cold salted water for 15 minutes, then drain and dry them thoroughly in a cloth.
  4. Heat the oil to 170°C and fry the slices in small batches for 3 to 4 minutes, turning, until golden and crisp.
  5. Drain on paper, salt at once, and let them cool before storing in an airtight tin.

Notes

Some Seychellois cooks dust the finished chips with chilli powder or a little sugar. The sweet ladob, in which breadfruit is one of the traditional fruits, is a separate recipe in the atlas.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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