Pacific Islands · Main
Lu Sipi
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg mutton flap or lamb belly, cut into 4 cm pieces
- 40 young taro leaves (lu), ribs removed, about 800 g
- 600 ml first pressing coconut cream
- 2 onions, 250 g, sliced
- 12 g sea salt
- banana leaves for lining, or a double layer of foil
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
The words inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Trim only the hardest of the fat cap off the flap and leave a good 5 mm on; that fat is the cooking medium and, later, the sauce.
- Line a deep pot with a double layer of banana leaf, then build alternating layers of taro leaf, mutton, onion and salt, finishing with a thick lid of taro leaf.
- Pour the coconut cream over so it soaks down through every layer, fold the leaves across the top and put the lid on tight.
- Cook at 160C (320F), or on the lowest flame the hob will hold, until the mutton pulls apart between finger and thumb and the leaves have gone to a dark sludge.
- Open the parcel and stir once: the clear rendered oil sitting on top is stirred back through, never poured off.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet or Rioja Reserva
- Also Right
- Malbec
- From the Taps
- Porter
- Zero-Proof
- Pomegranate spritz
Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.
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