Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 09, The Taro Patch, the Pounding Stone and the Sakau Cup
Fahfah
Kosrae
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Kosrae's single best-documented dish: soft taro, kuhtak, baked in the earth oven, then pounded, customarily by a first-born son, with banana, and, in the fiti variant, finished under el, a caramelised coconut milk sauce. Reserved traditionally for feasts and for pork, not everyday eating.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
- 800 g taro (kuhtak)
- 2 ripe bananas
- 400 ml coconut milk
- 2 tbsp sugar
Method
- Bake or steam the taro until fully tender, roughly 40 minutes.
- Pound with the bananas while hot until smooth and elastic, the same working action as kon.
- Separately, simmer the coconut milk with the sugar over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring, until it darkens and thickens to a caramel sauce, el.
- Pour the el generously over the pounded taro and serve warm.
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 el reduced further as a true caramel, and a blowtorched crust the traditional pour-over does not have
Rungs 2 and 3
Method
- Reduce the el further and finish it with a pinch of salt, treating it properly as a caramel rather than a sweetened sauce.
- Use a small blowtorch to lightly caramelise the surface of the plated, pounded taro before saucing, giving fahfah a genuine brûlée crust the traditional pour-over version does not have.
- Serve with a single quenelle of unsweetened whipped coconut cream alongside, cutting the el's richness the way crème fraîche would cut a British pudding.