Breadfruit of the Evening, Beautiful Breadfruit

After the recent snowstorm [see news reports of “Snowzilla”] had subsided and the cars were dug out, I trundled over to H-Mart because we’d cooked essentially all of the available protein and a good chunk of everything else. Most of the parking lot was an unblemished expanse of whiteness, but they’d plowed a few areas (the resulting piles of glop were about 12 feet tall), and they were open. In addition to all of the usual happy things inside (H-Mart is pretty cool), I was unexpectedly greeted by a bin of smiling little breadfruits, begging to be taken home by someone. They seemed to be at just the right degree of ripeness, and I was not about to resist. Here is the one I bought, sitting in a baking pan:

(For scale, that pan is just about 9" across inside, rim to rim. As breadfruits go, these really were rather small.)

FYI, the unprotected baking pan was a slight tactical error. Latex oozes out of the fruit, and even though there wasn’t very much, it took me a while to get the cooked result off the surface. It is wisest to protect the pan from this, unless perhaps it is your regular breadfruit-baking pan and is already liberally coated with the stuff, or for some other reason you don’t care. (If you weren’t already aware of this issue, please take notice and file for future reference.)

It did not seem practical to build a fire in the snow, so I did something I’ve never done before: chucked the thing into a 300° [Fahrenheit] oven. Then I accidentally forgot it for more than 2 hours, until the happy aroma caught up with me. I’d say “oops”, as I was afraid it would be burnt to a crisp, but it turned out just fine. Here it is after I cut it in two, before I chopped out the stem, which is rubbery and not nice to eat:

Although it lacks the toasty flavor you get if you cook it in a bed of coals, baked breadfruit is just fine with me.