Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 14, The Stone Garden, the Earth Oven and the Company Fence
Po'e
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Po'e is named consistently as the island's characteristic traditional sweet, though it survives only in weaker, recipe-blog sourcing rather than an academic record, and this chapter says so rather than dressing it up as more solid than it is. Ripe banana is mashed, sometimes with pumpkin, sweet potato or taro worked through it, sweetened with pressed sugarcane juice, wrapped in banana leaf, and cooked in the same earth-oven heat as the savoury dishes above, usually as part of a full umu spread rather than on its own. A number of modern recipes for po'e include coconut; given this island has no living coconut tradition, this chapter treats any coconut in po'e as a recent import rather than an indigenous element, and leaves it out.
As tradition built it
Serves 6, as dessert. About 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- 6 very ripe bananas
- 200ml fresh sugarcane juice (available frozen or bottled from most East and Southeast Asian grocers; failing that, a light sugar syrup with a squeeze of lime is a fair substitute)
- a pinch a small pinch of salt
- 6 large banana leaf squares
Method
- Mash the bananas with a fork until smooth.
- Press the sugarcane juice into the mash, along with the salt.
- Divide the mixture between the banana leaf squares and fold into parcels.
- Steam over simmering water for 35 to 40 minutes, or set the parcels in a Big Green Egg at 160°C with a water pan for the same time, until set to a dense, moist pudding that holds its shape when unwrapped.
What a modern chef changes
Concentrated cane sweetness against a dehydrated banana crisp
Method
- Concentrate the sugarcane sweetness rather than diluting it: reduce fresh sugarcane juice by half in a pan before folding it through the banana, so the pudding carries real cane depth rather than simple sugar sweetness.
- Use a dehydrator to make a thin, brittle banana crisp as garnish, drying thin banana slices at 60°C for four to five hours until they snap, a textural contrast, soft pudding against a shattering crisp, that the earth oven alone could never produce, set beside the pudding rather than folded into it.