Pacific Islands · Dessert
Faikakai Topai
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a sweet edge rounding the corners, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 300 g plain flour
- 10 g baking powder
- 3 g fine salt
- 200 ml water, for the dough
- 250 g dark brown sugar
- 80 ml water, for the caramel
- 500 ml first pressing coconut cream
The skills inside
Sugar stages & caramelFrying the paste until the oil splits
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Melt the sugar with the 80 ml of water in a wide heavy pan and boil it without stirring until it darkens to the colour of strong tea and smells of toast.
- Stand back and pour in the coconut cream; it will boil up hard, then settle to a caramel the colour of wet sand.
- Simmer the sauce, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon and a slick of clear oil begins to show at the edge, then take it off the heat to cool to just warm.
- Mix the flour, baking powder, salt and the 200 ml of water to a soft sticky dough and drop rough walnut sized lumps into a wide pan of boiling water.
- Boil until the dumplings bob to the surface, then give them two minutes more so the centres are not raw; a split one should be white and open, not grey and dense.
- Lift the dumplings straight out with a slotted spoon into the warm sauce and turn them over until every one is glossy.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Sugar stages & caramel 53 recipes
- Nothing is stirred once it is boiling, and any crystals clinging to the side of the pan are brushed down rather than left to fall in.
- Judged by temperature or by a tested stage rather than by time: consecutive stages are a few degrees apart and look identical in the pan.
- Colour is read off the heat and in good light, remembering that sugar keeps darkening after the flame is out.
- Stopped decisively at the point wanted: off the heat and into the next liquid or onto a cold surface, rather than left to coast in a hot pan.
- The result is clear and smooth rather than grainy, cloudy, or seized into a solid mass.
Where it goes wrong It was stirred after coming to the boil, or a stray crystal from the side of the pan fell back in. One crystal seeds the whole pan and the syrup turns grainy within seconds, and once sugar has crystallised the only cure is more water and starting the whole thing again.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Tawny Port
- Also Right
- PX Sherry or bourbon
- From the Taps
- Barleywine
- Zero-Proof
- Cold-brew coffee
Caramel echoing caramel: oxidative aging built the same flavors into the glass that the pan built into the plate.
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