Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 07, The Reef, the Earth Oven and the Girmit Table
Lovo: Chicken, Dalo and Palusami from the Earth Oven
iTaukei Fiji
Illustration
- Time
- 4 hours
- Researched
- 9 sources cited
A pit dug into the ground, river stones heated for hours over an open wood fire until they hold ferocious heat, then arranged to line the pit floor and covered with green banana leaves. Marinated chicken, wrapped in banana leaf, goes in with root vegetables, dalo and tavioka, laid more loosely among the stones, and palusami parcels wrapped tightly enough to steam in their own coconut cream. More leaves go over the whole pile, then the pit is sealed with soil, trapping heat and steam for one to four hours depending on what is inside. No source found gives a numeric stone temperature or documents genuine regional variation in construction with any ethnographic precision; this chapter presents lovo as the single generalised technique the sources actually support, rather than inventing regional colour it cannot back up.
As tradition built it
Serves 6 to 8. About 4 hours for the oven version below, including marinating; a true lovo pit needs an outdoor fire and several hours instead.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg whole chicken pieces, bone in
- 400 ml coconut cream
- 4 cloves garlic, crushed
- 2 limes juice of 2 limes
- to taste salt
- 1 kg dalo (taro), peeled, cut into large chunks
- 1 kg tavioka (cassava), peeled, cut into large chunks, soaked several hours to overnight before cooking
- as available banana leaves, enough to wrap generously (available fresh or frozen from UK Asian and Caribbean grocers)
Method
- Marinate the chicken in coconut cream, garlic, lime juice and salt for at least 2 hours.
- Wrap the chicken tightly in banana leaf, several layers.
- In a true lovo, lay the wrapped chicken and the dalo and tavioka onto the hot, leaf-covered stones, seal the pit with more leaves and soil, and leave 1 to 4 hours, longer for a larger quantity or a whole bird rather than pieces.
- At home without a pit: bake the wrapped chicken and root vegetables together at 160°C for about 2 hours, checking the chicken is cooked through.
What a modern chef changes
Two separate mechanisms, sous vide for the even, gentle interior a stone pit gives for free, then live fire for the smoke a sealed bag can never provide
Rung 2
Method
- Sous vide the chicken at 75°C for 3 hours, wrapped in banana leaf inside the bag for aroma, for an evenly, gently cooked result no domestic oven can match on its own.
- Finish on a Big Green Egg run low, around 110 to 120°C, with a genuine wood chunk, not chips, for real smoke, the chicken unwrapped from its sous vide bag and briefly rewrapped in fresh banana leaf, giving back the smoke and leaf-char character the sealed bag removed entirely.
- State this plainly to the reader rather than imply equivalence: this two-stage reconstruction approximates lovo's heat profile and smoke character; it does not reproduce a stone pit's moist, steamed, large-format cooking, and a Big Green Egg, even a large one, cannot match the scale of a true earth oven feeding a village.