r o f e v o L y M ichael Harrison
Chef M
“My love for breadfruit goes far beyond the taste. My fascination started as a boy roasting them while living in St John from around age nine years. I moved to Ferniehurst at the age of 11 to attend secondary school and continued roasting breadfruit and dove during the summer holidays. The only way I liked breadfruit back then was either roasted or green in Bajan soup and both of those are absolutely delicious. As I got older and became a chef, my love and appreciation for it grew, so I started to experiment and explore it, but because of a fascination with having it roasted I focus a lot on that.
14 FineCuisine | DECEMBER 2020
I must say the team at Yellow Meat took the breadfruit from the boys on the block to regular Bajans, and inspired me to become more creative with it. So, the breadfruit serves the purpose for which it was originally intended when it was introduced to the Caribbean as a cheap source of food for the enslaved, but in our modern day case it was cheap lunch for hungry boys during holidays from school. The funny thing is that people from different levels of society would have looked down on us for eating roast breadfruit as a meal, and now they spend from $20 and in one instance a few thousand dollars to have me set up a breadfruit bar which is just the roast breadfruit with multiple toppings including lobster, shrimp, pickled pigtails, braised blackbelly lamb, smoked herring and different butters including my smoked tomato tarragon butter, traditional Mello Kreem butter and different relishes like sour cucumbers, Asian slaw, pesto and shaved parmesan. I welcome the opportunity to
educate people, especially visitors to the island, about the breadfruit story. It is one of adventure and mutiny. The ship HMS Bounty was a botanical ship commissioned to collect and transport breadfruit plants to the West Indies from Tahiti in the South Pacific Ocean as a cheap source of food for the enslaved. As the story goes, when the ship left England and reached the Polynesians Islands, the crew spent most of the time collecting the breadfruit plants and developing relationships with ladies on the island. After a few months the ship set sail for the West Indies, but the crew
