Lakoocha, Lacucha or Monkey Jack, is a unique tropical fruit tree (deciduous outside of the tropics) native to India’s humid regions. It is a rare Artocarpus related to Jackfruit and the trees are traditionally used for their fruit and to make furniture and timber. The orange fruit has a sweet, tangy, citrusy flavor and a Jackfruit-like texture. In Lakoocha's native enthronement, you’d find it growing wild by streams or lowland areas in India where locals of the Kalasin Privince chew the high-tannin wood, occasionally with Betel Nut, and use the wood to create instruments called pong langs, similar to xylophones.
Lakoocha's flower spikes are pickled into chutneys. The green-to-yellow, knobbly skinned fruit bears a sweet, tangy, semi-acidic flavor which carries culinary and medicinal value and is commonly eaten out of hand in late summer, believed to be a tonic for the liver.
Not only does the Lakoocha bear delicious fruit, it is an important source of firewood and termite resistant timber in Nepal which can be equally useful for your own hardwood projects if extra limbs need removing!
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