Tahitian breadfruit roasted over an open fire until the skin chars, eaten hot with miti hue, the sour fermented sauce of young coconut, salt water, and prawn heads
Origin: Tahiti & the Society Islands
From the journey of Breadfruit.
Breadfruit, ʻuru, was the staple starch of the Society Islands when Europeans first reached them, and the simplest way of cooking it is still the favourite: the whole fruit is laid on an open fire or among hot stones until the skin is black, then peeled and eaten hot. In Tahitian cooking the starch, māʻa, is eaten with a sauce, miti, and the most characteristic of the sauces is miti hue. The flesh of young coconuts is cut up and left in a calabash with salt water and the heads of freshwater prawns to ferment in the sun for a few days, until it is sour, salty, and pungent. It is the sauce for fafaru, the fermented fish, and it is what makes a plain roasted breadfruit a meal. Europe learned about breadfruit here. Joseph Banks and the artist Sydney Parkinson reached Tahiti with James Cook on the Endeavour in 1769. Parkinson painted the tree and named it Sitodium altile, from the Latin altilis, fattened or nourishing, in the journal his brother Stanfield published in 1773, and his epithet survives in the modern name Artocarpus altilis. It was Banks, who had seen the tree in Tahiti, who proposed to George III that it be carried to the Caribbean, and so it was to Tahiti that William Bligh was sent for plants, twice.
The breadfruit can be roasted in the oven at 200°C for about an hour, without the smoke. Where the fermented sauce is too strong for the table, Tahitian households use miti haʻari, fresh coconut milk salted with sea water, which is made in minutes.
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