In the back of beyond, on a blazing Pacific morning, a local chef-turned-food custodian encourages a Kiwi visitor to get up close and personal with culinary Polynesia. We are standing next to one of the spring-fed taro ponds at Kāko’o ‘Ōiwi, in He’eia, an indigenous farming project 40 minutes out of Honolulu, on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu.
The operation supplies a growing number of local restaurants and retailers with indigenous staples, including this super-healthy root vegetable, all green and red in the nutrient-rich waters as dark as jade.
“You might want to take your shoes off and roll up your trousers first,” murmurs Kealoha Domingo, a burly caterer who doubles as a local guide, as we survey the patch.
Visitors are encouraged to dip their toes into the water and yank out a few weeds while Domingo continues offering a fast and passionate history of what used to be O’ahu’s biggest taro-producing operation.
For more than 1000 years, taro – or kalo, as the locals have it – was a star local crop. Food for the gods, they called it. But for much of this past cruel and crooked century, its culinary star waned.
Today, along with breadfruit, sweet potatoes and banana, and the more familiar chicken and reef fish, it is staging a comeback. Inhabitants of all cultural hues in America’s 50th state are rediscovering the Pasifika food style. So has the local office of Hawaiian Tourism, which is as likely these days to arrange such a visit as to try for an evening out with George Clooney at the Outrigger Canoe Club overlooking the azure seas, bikini-clad swimmers and creaking palms of Waikiki.
Domingo, a native Hawaiian, is happy to be playing his part in the revival. A chef first, he came to native-style cooking after trying his hand at a number of other indigenous pursuits, dabbling in the Hawaiian martial art of lua, even a little hula.
Today, he serves on the board of Kāko’o ‘Ōiwi and works as one of its knowledgeable guides, whether explaining the religious connotations of taro, the best recipes for banana or pointing out the features of the 800-year-old reef fish pond the operation maintains down the road near the sun-kissed beach.
All of which is ukulele-strumming music to this Kiwi writer’s ears. I became interested in learning more about the food of Polynesia (yes, yes, I know, but for epicurean purposes the broad appellation fits slightly better than Pasifika) when I was putting together The RNZ Cookbook in late 2022.
The project involved sifting through thousands of previously published recipes. Locating 180 of the “best of the local best” for the kitchen libraries of home chefs was a big deal. And quite frustrating, too.
When it came to high-end Polynesian cuisine, including restaurant-style Māori food, there was surprisingly little to choose from in the local media record, give or take the trailblazing work of Wellington restaurateur Monique Fiso, the newfound emphasis on all things regional that a star chef such as Peter Gordon is bringing to the craft at Auckland’s Homeland, or within the pages of Robert Oliver’s Me’a Kai: The Food and Flavours of the South Pacific.
It was as if most of the country’s celebrity chefs and food writers operated somewhere far removed from the vast Polynesian triangle, stretching as it does from the remote Chilean territory of Rapa Nui and Hawaii to Aotearoa, and taking in varied island-nations along the way. It was like putting together a cookbook in Sicily and discovering that hardly any local epicurean stars knew anything much about Italian food.
Perhaps that shouldn’t have been surprising. As the New York Times noted a few years ago, whether in Honolulu or Hamilton, any traveller to our region looking for Polynesian cuisine has for a long time had their work cut out to find “anything beyond their resort’s carefully choreographed luau”.
Still, the eight main inhabited islands of this far-flung jurisdiction have been nudging things in a better direction longer than most.
Voyage of rediscovery
Domingo’s not-for-profit farm – proceeds fund wetland restoration at He’eia – is one of the most visible manifestations of a revitalised culinary movement that began here more than 50 years ago but which these days sits prominently alongside imported food attractions – like the vanilla beans on the Big Island, the state’s famous coffee, or ubiquitous fish tacos.
In 1975, the canoe Hōkūleʻa – named after the zenith star of the islands – embarked on a boat journey across the Pacific Rim. The double-hulled waka was modelled on the earlier version that first brought Polynesians to Hawaii. Probably, the original seafarers hailed from Taiwan, voyaging by way of Tahiti, and ultimately on to what is now New Zealand. Kanaka maoli, or the natives, they called themselves, the last word being etymologically linked to the word Māori.
In the case of Hawaii, the event from 50 years ago signalled the start of a period uncovering and recovering the native language and culture. Unearthing original recipes was also a part of it, and a challenging one, given the lack of a written record during much of the early period.
In the early 1990s, a group of chefs banded together to promote ingredients from local farmers and fishers rather than rely on imported food, which tends to come from the American mainland and, even by New Zealand standards, can be hideously expensive.
Initially at least, the regional style of cooking focused less on native custom than on the mix of east and west – fusion cooking, as the horribly overused term has it – and there’s still plenty of it to be enjoyed.
Global foodbowl
In a sense, of course, almost everything fits under this rubric. As the London-based Yotam Ottolenghi said when I interviewed him for the Listener last year, the history of food is largely the history of conquest and assimilation.
Monique Fiso shows as much in Wellington, for example, with her ika and kūmara – grilled fish, confit kūmara and agria potato, lacto-fermented tomato dressing and kūmara chips with broccoli – which is a sort of riff on the “Kiwi classic” of fish and chips. But the Kiwi classic is itself a riff on a British classic, which in turn is a riff on a kosher classic brought from the continent by Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s.
Whatever the gloriously scrambled history of the dish, though, it helps from a marketing point of view to have a potentially world-famous item with your own particular brand on it. Here, the native Hawaiians got very lucky with the truly ubiquitous poke bowl.
As high-end Kiwi diners already know, this totally Instagrammable dish (say poh keh, and for heaven’s sake never use an accent over the “e”) typically uses pre-marinated deep-sea fish chopped sideways (the literal meaning of the name) served with salt, limu (a kind of brown seaweed), green onions, soy sauce, chillies, rice wine, maybe even some garlic, and definitely rice.
In Hawaii, you find bowls of the stuff everywhere, at many eateries and in the supermarkets that offer tray after refrigerated tray of it, sometimes made a day earlier to allow for extra zing from the fermentation.
At the hands-on Hawaiian Style Cooking Class I went to on the Diamond Head coast of Honolulu, we rustled up no fewer than three versions of the dish on the night.
Like much else in the international cookbook, however, this delicious raw fish salad is as much a textbook history of recent migrant groups as the islands’ original inhabitants. Onions, for example, didn’t arrive here until 1778, courtesy of Captain James Cook; the widely used chilli flakes showed up more recently. And the sashimi-style inclusion of tuna or salmon says more about the Japanese fishers in the 1970s than ancient Polynesian mariners who typically relied on small reef fish.
“What is considered Hawaiian food today is heavily influenced by the plantation era,” Domingo says with a slight frown. “I mean, go into any commercial Hawaiian food establishment today and you’ll have a mixture of traditional Hawaiian food with, for example, lomi-lomi salmon, which is basically something like a salad with salted bits of salmon in it.
“But obviously, we never had salmon in Hawaii, but rather” – he gestures towards the operation’s small reef fish farm – “we used the little guys.”
Don’t get him started on pineapple. At one time, Hawaii used to produce more of it than anywhere else in the world, and the word has long been synonymous with it as an international tourist destination. (Also, for the record, Pineapples is the name of a jazzy diner I visited in the otherwise slightly menacing township of Hilo on the Big Island.)
As with the other great colonial cash crop, sugar, which was first established in 1835, pineapple turned out to be rough from an ecological and environmental point of view, he says with a frown, “not to mention cultural”.
Among the local eating destinations Domingo advises is the nearby Highway Inn, located a little out of the central city in Honolulu. Established in 1947, it’s one of the oldest family-owned food businesses in the state, with a menu that goes back many centuries earlier.
The inn operates two branches, offering poi, chicken laulau (rhymes with wow wow) and, of course, poke. The last item uses inamona, a condiment made from the seed kernels of kukui nuts, and Hawaiian seaweed to bring out local flavours.
“We don’t have multiple layers like these newer restaurants that have amazing flavour and dimensions,” explains third-generation owner Monica Toguchi Ryan. “It is very simple, but simple in the best sense. It actually takes a lot of time and a lot of aloha [love] to make.” Not to mention a lot of salt.
“This is something I always tell people who come in,” Toguchi Ryan explains over a chatty lunch. “I say you can’t compare native Hawaiian food with foods like Korean food or Italian food or Indian food, and if you make those comparisons you’ll be very disappointed.
“It’s a different story, a different history, a different climate. So for Hawaiians, something like salt was always a main ingredient, because salt is a big part of the preservation of food. So we do that.”
Poi is probably the most visually unimpressive dish of all on her menu, yet also by far the most culturally significant. The one-ingredient recipe involves the taro root being steamed and pounded with water until it becomes a smoky smooth paste.
Poi is the original food for four major Hawaiian deities, Kāne, Kanaloa, Kū and Lono. Protocol dictates that no fighting is allowed when a bowl is served.
Not that anyone these days wants to scrap over the merits of Polynesian cuisine. Whether as an organising principle for a bit of regional holiday travel or a taster of what is coming to the wider regional table, there’s nothing to quarrel about when it comes to this brand-new ancient cuisine.
Poke at home
This dead-easy recipe, which I first made along with a couple of other poke items at the Hawaiian Style Cooking Class in Honolulu, suits this time of year. This is partly for its summery taste but also because it’s so straightforward to make, notwithstanding the conventional kitchen wisdom that the simpler the food, the harder it can be to prepare well. The ingredients here are mostly easy to source locally, although the mushrooms in this one are a substitute for the more usual seaweed.
The tuna cubes, tossed with soy sauce, sesame oil and green onions, offer a dish full of umami flavour. There are numerous variations. I like to add a bit of crushed garlic, even though it’s not “authentic”.
Makes 4 main courses or 8 appetisers.
- 1kg tuna, cut into 2cm cubes
- ½ onion, diced
- 1 tsp chilli flakes
- 1 tbsp sesame oil
- 2-3 tsp kosher salt
- 2 tbsp chopped nuts
- 2 tsp soy sauce
- ½ cup sliced and diced mushrooms (or use the more traditional limu/seaweed)
- A squeeze of lemon (or, if you’re game, wasabi)
- Green onion to garnish
Combine everything in a bowl, gently folding until blended. Put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. Serve in bowls either atop warm white rice or alongside it.
The Hawaiian Tourism Authority assisted with David Cohen’s visit.