Laulau

Hawaiian bundles of pork and salted fish wrapped in taro leaves, tied in ti leaf and steamed for four hours until the leaf turns to silk

Origin: Waipiʻo Valley & the Hawaiian Islands

From the journey of Taro.

Lau is leaf, and doubling it gives the plural: laulau is simply leaves, which understates a dish that takes the better part of a day. Pork, and traditionally a piece of salted butterfish alongside it, is wrapped in several young taro leaves, that parcel is wrapped again in ti leaf, and the bundles are steamed until both the meat and the inner wrapping have given up entirely. The two leaves do different jobs and the distinction matters. The lūʻau leaf inside is food: it collapses into a dark, silken, faintly mineral mass that is the best part of the dish. The ti leaf outside is packaging: it is tough, aromatic, and inedible, and it is untied and discarded at the table. Serving a laulau in its ti leaf and expecting a guest to eat it is the commonest mistake made outside Hawaiʻi. In its older form the bundles went into the imu, the earth oven, alongside the whole pig at a lūʻau, and took on smoke that no stove can reproduce. The feast itself is named for the leaf rather than the other way round: lūʻau came to mean the gathering because the leaf dish was what defined the menu, and the word displaced the older ʻahaʻaina during the nineteenth century. The salted butterfish is what separates a good laulau from a merely adequate one. A small piece of black cod cured hard in salt sits against the pork, and over four hours its salt and oil work through the whole parcel; the leaves take it up and so does the meat. Modern shortcuts steam laulau in foil, which works and which loses the point, since a great deal of what the dish tastes of comes from the ti leaf pressing against the taro for four hours.

Ingredients

Bundles

  • 900 g pork shoulder, in 150g pieces with the fat left on
  • 200 g salted butterfish or black cod, in six pieces
  • 2 tsp coarse sea salt
  • 60 young taro (lūʻau) leaves, thick stems and central ribs removed

Wrapping

  • 12 ti leaves, or banana leaves, spines trimmed flat
  • 1 kitchen string, or strips torn from a spare ti leaf

To serve

  • 6 portions of steamed rice or poi, to serve

Method

  1. Strip the taro leaves from their stems and cut out the thick central rib of each, which never softens. Wash them and set them aside. Sixty leaves looks absurd and is correct.
  2. If the salted fish is very hard, soak it in cold water for an hour and drain it. If it is lightly cured, use it as it is.
  3. Season the pork with the salt. It needs less than it looks, because the fish will salt the parcel as it cooks.
  4. For each bundle, lay eight to ten taro leaves in an overlapping circle, put a piece of pork and a piece of fish in the middle, and gather the leaves up and around the meat so that nothing is exposed.
  5. Set the leaf parcel in the centre of two crossed ti leaves, fold them over, and tie the whole firmly with string. The bundle must be tight or it will fall open and steam through.
  6. Set the bundles seam side down in a steamer over boiling water, in a single layer if you can.
  7. Steam for four hours. Top the water up as it goes and do not let the pan boil dry.
  8. Do not shorten this. The pork needs the time, and the taro leaf needs every minute of it: undercooked taro leaf will burn the mouth and throat sharply and for hours.
  9. The bundles are ready when the pork gives to a fork and the leaf inside has gone black-green and completely soft, with no trace of structure left.
  10. Serve them tied. Each person cuts the string, opens and discards the outer ti leaf, and eats everything inside it with rice or poi.

Notes

The distinction between the two leaves is the thing to get right: the taro leaf inside is eaten, the ti leaf outside is not. Frozen taro leaves from a Pacific or Asian grocer are what most cooks now use and they work well. Do not substitute spinach, which vanishes in four hours of steaming and gives none of the mineral depth the dish is built on; cassava leaf is the closest available stand-in. Four hours is a minimum rather than a target, and an extra hour does no harm at all. If you cannot find ti leaves, banana leaf is the usual substitute and foil the last resort, though foil gives you a steamed parcel rather than a laulau.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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