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Credit...Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Megan Hedgpeth.

Is it skill, gift or mystic power to know when a fruit is truly, perfectly ripe? Robynne Maii, a chef and co-owner of Fête in Honolulu, remembers her grandmother’s keeping vigil over a bunch of bananas, checking them every two hours. The banana appears obliging, the green ebbing from the peel and the yellow growing brighter, like a sun in bloom. Then — blink! — the swift collapse into freckled mush begins. Like bankruptcy in a Hemingway novel, ripening happens gradually and then suddenly.

Recipe: Mashed ‘Ulu With Passion Fruit Chutney

Not all fruits are so mercurial. Apples soldier on for weeks in the fridge, loyally crisp. But an avocado or a peach is unmoved by human need and insistent on its own understanding of time. It must be squeezed (gently) and only the most patient and committed can catch it at just the moment its guard comes down.

The fruit that eluded Maii for years was ‘ulu, breadfruit in Hawaiian: hefty as a melon and green and bumpy all over, like a baby dragon waiting to unfurl. ‘Ulu is her birthright, a staple of her native Hawaiian ancestors and a canoe crop brought by the Polynesian voyagers who started settling the islands in the fourth century. Yet she rarely ate it as a child in the 1970s and 1980s in eastern Oahu. Hawaiian customs and food were still marginalized then, a legacy of colonialism.

When Maii moved back to the islands in 2014, after finishing graduate school and working in New York, she was surprised to find ‘ulu on menus everywhere, as part of a movement to take back the ‘aina (land). Some chefs compared it with a plantain, others with a potato. It was starchy, vitamin-rich and resilient, championed as an answer to world hunger. But it typically ended up on plates in the form of fries or chips.

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