We cooked the gac with rice and coconut milk. It made a fine breakfast, but not quite fine enough that we’ll be rushing out to buy more gacs.

We bought a gac the other day. Here’s what it looked like:

(You can also use this opportunity to learn the Thai names of the week and their colors from Harriet’s table.)

Gac is a smaller variety of jackfruit (some details here) more commonly found in Vietnam. I’d been looking for one since trying gac juice at the Bang Nam Pheung floating market in Samut Prakan, which we thoughtfully failed to get any pictures of, so you’ll have to imagine how wonderful it was. But gac juice was really nice. So when I saw a gac for sale next to the shoe repair guy, I bought one. It’s kind of squishy, like a slightly deflated football that got a cactus with child.

When you cut it open it looks like this:

It’s an extremely dramatic fruit inside! Unfortunately it doesn’t really live up to that in taste: it’s kind of bland, a little like a softball, and the seeds that I cut open actively taste bad. The gac juice we had must have been heavily sweetened. It’s possible that this one isn’t ripe; certainly I wouldn’t know. Right now I am soaking the flesh and seeds with some rice to make xôi gấc, though who knows how that will turn out.

I just ate the bulk of one-kilo bag of these. They are plumper and sweeter than the passion fruit I’m used to, not to mention cheaper. (The going rate is about $1.25 for a large bag.)