Hawaiʻi's steamed taro corm pounded smooth on a board, thinned with water and left to sour, and graded by the number of fingers it takes to lift
Origin: Waipiʻo Valley & the Hawaiian Islands
From the journey of Taro.
Poi is not a side dish and Hawaiians will correct anyone who treats it as one. In Hawaiian thought kalo is an ancestor rather than a vegetable: the Hāloa tradition holds that the first child of Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani was stillborn, that taro grew from the place he was buried, and that the second child, from whom the Hawaiian people descend, was named for his elder brother. Kalo is therefore the senior sibling and poi is that sibling on the table, which is why the old rule holds that no one argues whilst the poi bowl is uncovered. The custom is not a metaphor for good manners. An ancestor is understood to be present. The technique is simple and unforgiving. Corms are steamed for hours, peeled whilst hot, and worked on a wooden board, the papa kuʻi ʻai, with a stone pounder, the pōhaku kuʻi ʻai, until the mass turns from crumbly to glossy and elastic; water is added a little at a time as it goes. The product at that stage is paʻi ʻai, dense enough to be wrapped in ti leaf and carried. Thinning it with more water makes poi, and poi is graded by consistency: one-finger poi is thick enough to need a single finger to carry it to the mouth, three-finger poi is loose. A cuisine that grades a staple by finger count has been paying attention to it for a very long time. Fresh poi is faintly sweet and tastes mostly of starch. What most people mean by poi is what happens over the next day or two, as wild lactic fermentation takes hold and it turns progressively sour, tangy, and then sharp. Hawaiians disagree about the ideal day with some feeling. Visitors frequently meet it on day three and conclude the dish is an acquired taste, which it is, in the way that sourdough and yoghurt are acquired tastes. Its decline and partial recovery are a matter of water rather than of appetite. The terraced pondfields that grew kalo needed streams, sugar and ranching diverted them, and the acreage collapsed through the twentieth century; the restoration of the loʻi since the 1970s has proceeded valley by valley and has been argued in the courts as much as in the fields.
Every part of raw taro carries needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals that will burn the mouth and throat for hours, and only thorough cooking destroys them; steam the corms until a skewer meets no resistance whatever and never taste them before that point. Wear gloves when handling raw corms, as the sap causes intense itching on the hands. A food processor will produce a smooth purée but not poi: the pounding stretches the starch in a way that blades cut instead, and the texture is different. If you cannot find fresh taro, frozen peeled corm from a Pacific or Asian grocer works and is what most households now use. Poi is eaten with salt fish, with lomi salmon, or with anything strongly salted, and its blandness against salt is the whole design.
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