Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 09, The Taro Patch, the Pounding Stone and the Sakau Cup
Demok
Palau
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 25 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Demok is widely called, though not officially confirmed as, Palau's national soup: young taro leaves, destemmed and blanched to temper their natural oxalates, boiled in coconut milk with onion, most often extended with mangrove crab, fish or pork sausage. It is never eaten without its starch half, the ongraol, rice or boiled taro served alongside.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 25 minutes.
Ingredients
- 400 g young taro leaves, destemmed
- 500 ml coconut milk
- 1 onion, sliced
- 1 thumb ginger, grated
- 300 g cleaned mangrove or brown crab, in the shell or picked
- to taste salt, to season
- to taste donne sali or another hot chilli, to season
- to serve rice or boiled taro, to serve, as the ongraol
Method
- Blanch the taro leaves in salted water for 2 minutes, then drain.
- Bring the coconut milk to a bare simmer with the sliced onion and grated ginger.
- Add the crab and simmer 8 minutes.
- Add the taro leaves and simmer a further 5 minutes, until the leaves have collapsed into the broth and lost any raw bitterness.
- Season with salt and a hit of donne sali or another hot chilli.
- Serve immediately, with rice or boiled taro alongside as the ongraol, the starch half of the two-part Palauan meal demok is never eaten without.
Notes
Quantities reconstructed from documented technique, order of operations and stated timings; no named traditional measured source was found for this dish.
What a modern chef changes
The broth rebuilt in two stages, so the coconut milk never splits against the crab
Rung 3
Method
- Poach the crab separately in a light court bouillon, rather than in the coconut milk itself, fixing demok's one real weakness as written, that boiling coconut milk hard enough to cook crab through tends to split it.
- Reduce the coconut milk on its own with the aromatics to a thick, unsplit sauce, finished off the heat with a spoon of the crab poaching liquor for depth.
- Blanch and shock the taro leaves rather than simmering them in the broth, holding their colour and losing none of their oxalate-tempering.
- Purée a third of the leaves with a little of the finished sauce in a high-power blender to a bright, smooth green liqueur.
- Spoon the leaf liqueur under the whole leaves and crab at the pass, rather than stirring it through.
Notes
The result reads as demok understood rather than demok reproduced: the same three ingredients, taro leaf, coconut, crab, given the separate, controlled attention a restaurant kitchen would give each.