Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 08, The Reducción, the Fiesta and the Fishing Stone
Tinaktak
CHamoru, Guam
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Finely chopped meat, usually beef, cooked in coconut milk with tomato and green beans, served over rice. Named for its own technique: taktak is an onomatopoeia for the sound of meat being chopped or tenderised.
Vegetable and seafood, Lenten, variants exist. No source consulted for this chapter gave exact gram quantities or timings for tinaktak; this chapter states that plainly rather than inventing a recipe. The San Francisco restaurant Prubechu, run by the CHamoru chef Shawn Naputi, offers the clearest documented contemporary reinterpretation found anywhere in this chapter's research: Naputi describes his own version as "a technique of braising a protein in coconut milk and lemon with aromatics," finished with housemade egg noodles, cherry tomatoes, button mushrooms and green beans, moving the dish from a rice-plate staple to a composed restaurant course while keeping its core cooking logic, coconut milk and citrus braise, intact.
As tradition built it
General method, as documented across multiple sources; no exact quantities given.
Ingredients
- 3 lb (or 3 lb lean ground beef) beef, finely chopped or minced
- 2 tins coconut milk
- 2 tins stewed tomatoes tomato
- 2 cups, trimmed and cut small green beans
- to serve cooked rice, to serve
Method
- Finely chop or mince the beef by hand, traditionally to the point where the chopping itself gives the dish its name.
- Cook the meat in coconut milk with tomato until the sauce has come together.
- Add green beans and cook through.
- Serve over rice.
What a modern chef changes
After Naputi's own documented restructuring of the dish, credited by name.
Method
- Braise the meat in coconut milk and lemon with aromatics, following Naputi's own stated method, at a controlled temperature rather than an open simmer.
- Finish with housemade egg noodles rather than rice, exactly as Prubechu serves it, treating the dish as a composed plate rather than a rice-bowl topping.
- Add cherry tomatoes and button mushrooms toward the end of cooking only, preserving their own texture against the long-cooked beef, rather than cooking them down with the meat throughout.