Food Lab 43: Hawaiian Cuisine

Last winter, Chef Spouse and I celebrated a milestone anniversary with a trip to Hawaii. We spent our first week on Kauai, and our second week on Oahu. I don't have enough time to tell you all the things that were wonderful about the trip (although perhaps the above photo, of what was functionally our private waterfall, beside which we drank our coffee every morning we were in Kapa'a might provide a clue), but one thing we loved in particular was our Hole In the Wall food tour of Honolulu's Chinatown (and thanks to one of my good foodie friends for recommending it).

After consuming kalua pork and manapuas and saimin and a zillion varieties of poke and shave ice and Leonard's famous malasadas and Liliha's equally famous coco puffs and fresh-made chow fun noodles and discovering the wonder that is li hing powder (and buying a GIANT bag of it to bring home), Chef Spouse and I knew we'd want to try to recreate some of these dishes at home.

Obviously, that full list is a little too, well, full, and this time (for once) we exercised some restraint BEFORE we committed ourselves to making 4,365 dishes in one day. From that list, Chef Spouse selected manapuas (which involved making regular kalua pork and char siu style pork) and poke (four varieties - tuna and salmon, traditional soy-based and spicy). I also wanted to make malasadas with guava and lilikoi (passionfruit) filling, but I got over-ruled, not least of which because Mad Kitchen Scientist has already made from-scratch ice cream sandwiches with from-scratch hazelnut ice cream (verdict: the Good Humor version can suck it).

Mad Kitchen Scientist took over prepping the kalua pork, and Chef Spouse and I took on sourcing the  fish for the poke.

Kalua pork recipes are interesting. They don't tend to start in a smoker, but rather recommend liquid smoke, Hawaiian alaea salt, and a slow cooker. And it *is* supposed to be quite soft. But Mad Kitchen Scientist has a Green Egg, so we decided to do the salt sub as prescribed, skip the liquid smoke, and smoke the pork, THEN put it in the slow cooker overnight. That turned out to be a good plan. The pork was resting in the slow cooker in its cooking liquid (aka FAT) when we arrived, and when we pulled it out shortly thereafter to sample, it was DELICIOUS.

You can put all sorts of things in manapua, but we opted for some of the kalua pork just as it was and some turned into more of a chai siu (Chinese barbecue) style pork. Inspired by the recipe at Genius Kitchen, we made Chinese barbecue sauce and dressed a pile of the shredded kalua pork with it.

That was all pretty straightforward.

The manapua dough, on the other hand, was not. Actually, making the dough was quite simple. We followed the recipe at Genius Kitchen and did two risings (each about an hour outside the fridge, although I would be interested in trying it again with the slower cold rise). The place we ran into trouble was with the "divide dough into 12 pieces" instructions. The dough uses six cups of flour.

Those look reasonable, right? I'm really kicking myself that I didn't get pictures of the manapuas post-steaming because they were ENORMOUS. Manapuas are supposed to be a palm-sized snack (or breakfast). Because they were so large, the ~15 minute steaming time instruction was not enough, either - several of the first batch came out unpleasantly raw doughy, so those went BACK in the steamer with the second batch.

Verdict: I want to try these again, but I either need to make a LOT less dough or cut it into a LOT more pieces.

The poke was pretty straightforward, particularly given our previous runs at raw meat. Buy good quality fish, cut it carefully, dress it yummily. Traditional poke uses a soy base. What else you add is pretty much up to you: furikake, fresh ginger, lime, onions or scallions (or both), avocado (or not), maybe a little sugar (for sweetness) or crushed red pepper (for spice), maybe top with a little fresh cilantro, or some fried shallots or garlic for crispiness, maybe serve with some sushi rice (for a poke bowl) or in nori (for a hand roll). We made tuna and salmon, and I thought the salmon was better, but they were both quite tasty.

However, I insisted that we had to make Foodland-style spicy poke, too. If you're never been to Hawaii, Foodland is a local grocery chain. "Wait! You're getting RAW FISH from the deli counter of a restaurant?" Damn right - Foodland has about a dozen varieties (or more) at any time, and they're all fresh and delicious. When we were on Kauai, we were staying in a cottage, so we made ourselves dinner many nights. We'd have our coffee by our waterfall, climb back up to the cottage where, coming through the yard, we'd pick fresh organic oranges and tangerines to squeeze for breakfast (and feed some deadfalls to the owners' pet pig Lucy), go out and hike or snorkel or kayak, and swing into Foodland in Kapa'a on the way home to pick up some poke to nosh on while we grilled our fish and cooked our veg, accompanied by daiquiris made with fresh organic limes from the yard and local Koloa rum. Yeah, you right.

The main difference is that you still marinate your fish in a soy base, but then you add a Sriracha and mayo combo sauce and, if you're feeling ritzy (which we were this weekend), some tobiko. It was SO GOOD.

(The poke was actually all so good that I neglected to take photos. Oops.)

This summer, I also challenged Chef Spouse to up his tiki drink game. Tiki gets kind of a bad rap, due to too many crap, processed, high-alcohol-and-not-much-else-to-recommend-it "tiki" drinks. Having had the opportunity to visit several authentic tiki bars in the past few years, I've learned that REAL tiki drinks are works of art that showcase an incredible range of rums, matched with complex combinations of freshly squeezed juices, accent alcohols, bitters, spices, and (ideally) from-scratch syrups (like homemade grenadine and orgeat).  To get a sense of the potential of tiki, I highly recommend checking out the Smuggler's Cove book. Chef Spouse used it as a guide to make us Dr. Funk, Planter's Punch, chartreuse swizzle, and hibiscus punch (using the homemade hibiscus liquor Mad Kitchen Scientist made with some of the MASSES of dried hibiscus flowers we had leftover from our homemade bitters lab). Incidentally, Dr. Funk may be my new favorite cocktail. Don't let the list of ingredients in tiki drinks intimidate you - most are relatively easy to come by (although you almost definitely WILL have to augment your rum holdings), and even the "make it yourself" stuff isn't too challenging (well, other than the orgeat - that's a bit of work, but it really is better than the bottled stuff).

I guess I'll have to do malasadas another time.