3 dishes people actually cook in Samoa: what they are, how long they take, and what you need to buy.
What can you cook from Samoa? 3 traditional Samoa dishes, from Oka i'a (30 min, the quickest) to Palusami (270 min, the longest). Each recipe is written step by step with full ingredient lists, free to read.
Samoa on the map. Drag to spin the planet.
Green bananas boiled and finished in a salted coconut cream and onion sauce, a starchy Samoan side rather than a dessert.
Cubes of raw fish cured in lime juice, then mixed with coconut cream, tomato, onion and cucumber: Samoa's raw fish salad.
Coconut cream baked for hours inside a parcel of young taro leaves until it thickens and darkens.
Copper documents three dishes from Samoa: Fa'alifu fa'i, Oka i'a and Palusami. Coconut cream and onion each appear in more than one recipe. Two of the three are boiled. One of the three needs an oven. Between them they use 14 different ingredients.
The three recipes need 14 ingredients between them, of which 2 are shared by more than one dish. Coconut cream the hardest to find: of the 586 dishes in Copper's atlas, 22 use coconut cream. Every ingredient list on this page is complete, with quantities, and free to read.
Oka i'a is the quickest at 30 minutes. Palusami is the longest at 270 minutes, most of it unattended. The median is 40 minutes — a weeknight, not a project.
Fa'alifu fa'i and Oka i'a are rated easy — start there. The full method is on each recipe page, step by step, free to read.
Samoa is part of Pacific Island.
Countries close to Samoa on the globe — and close on the plate.
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