Hawaiian breadfruit poi: steamed ʻulu pounded smooth with water on a wooden board, eaten fresh and mild or left for a day or two to sour
Origin: Kohala & the Hawaiian Islands
From the journey of Breadfruit.
Poi means taro to most people, and in Hawaiʻi it mostly does. But poi is a method before it is an ingredient: a cooked starch pounded with water on a wooden board, the papa kuʻi ʻai, with a stone pounder, the pōhaku kuʻi ʻai, until it is smooth. Breadfruit, ʻulu, was pounded in the same way, and poi ʻulu was the poi of districts where breadfruit grew better than taro. It is lighter, sweeter, and less sticky than taro poi, and it sours faster. Breadfruit reached Hawaiʻi with the Polynesian voyagers who settled the islands, and Mark McCoy, Michael Graves, and Gail Murakami have dated its arrival by radiocarbon: breadfruit wood charcoal from North Kohala, on Hawaiʻi Island, shows the tree growing there by the late thirteenth century. The Hawaiian ʻulu is a sterile, seedless cultivar. It cannot grow from seed, so it can only have come as a living root shoot, kept alive in a voyaging canoe across thousands of miles of open ocean. Hawaiian oral traditions speak of more than one introduction.
Serve it as the starch of a Hawaiian plate, alongside kālua pork, lomi salmon, or squid lūʻau. The taro poi is a separate recipe in the atlas. Frozen steamed ʻulu, now sold by Hawaiian growers' co-operatives, makes good poi out of season.
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