Not Just Stew · The atlas · A working atlas of the world's cooking

Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 06, The Root, the Reef and the Earth Oven

Nalot

Vanuatu

Nalot, pounded breadfruit finished with a second pour of stone heated coconut milk: a pale golden, smooth mound of pounded breadfruit on a dark wooden plate, its surface glistening and slightly pooled with coconut milk.

Illustration

Time
About 1 hour to 2 hours 30Our estimate, from comparable dishes.

Fresh breadfruit roasted whole in the fire, the rind, core and seeds removed, the flesh pounded on a wooden plate with a pestle, then mixed thoroughly with coconut milk and laid onto a wooden dish, filled with a further pour of hot, stone-heated coconut milk. Nalot can also be made from taro rather than breadfruit. [Labouisse 2016, the single strongest source on this dish]

As tradition built it

No quantities or times given.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

For the heat

  • hot stones

Method

  1. Roast the breadfruit in the fire.
  2. Remove the rind, the core and the seeds.
  3. Pound the flesh on a wooden plate with a pestle.
  4. Add coconut milk and mix the mass thoroughly.
  5. Lay the pudding on a wooden dish and press a hollow into it with a piece of coconut shell.
  6. Heat the second batch of coconut milk by setting hot stones in it in a large wooden spoon, and pour it into the hollow.

Notes

The method is Jean-Pierre Labouisse's account, in Ethnobiology Letters (2016), from fieldwork in Vanuatu; the hot stones in the wooden spoon are from Christophe Jourdan's 2002 photograph on Ureparapara, in the Banks Group. It gives no quantities. Taro as an alternative appears only in a French travel blog and is not printed.

What a modern chef changes

The pounding stage reproduced by blender, and the two-stage coconut milk pour kept exactly as documented

Rungs 3 and 4

Method

  1. Purée the roasted breadfruit flesh in a high power blender rather than hand pounding, for a smoother, more homogeneous base achievable in a fraction of the time. Rung 3.
  2. Heat a sear stone separately and lower it into the second batch of coconut milk, reproducing the specific stone-heated pour rather than simply warming the milk on a hob. Rung 4.
  3. Finish with a light dehydrator-crisped breadfruit skin shard as garnish, a texture contrast not documented in any traditional source and offered here plainly as this chapter's own addition, not a discovered technique.
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