My dairy-allergic daughter is quite fond of salt. We have a salt shaker full of Celtic Sea Salt on the table, and it may as well have her name on it. She loves to put salt on her food. All her food. No matter what it is, it can’t be too salty for her. She even likes it on sweet things. Back in our eating-out days, she’d dip her well-salted french fries in her milkshake. I suspect that the saltiness of cheese is its main attraction for her.

This fondness for salty food is actually working to our benefit in our quest for the traditional. Lacto-fermented foods use whey for a headstart in the fermentation process, but the process works just as well using only sea salt. This week I made fermented taro root. I wasn’t at all sure what the final product would be, and I’m not at all sure my final product looks like anyone else’s! But, here it is:
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The hardest part of the recipe was finding the taro root! There was a piece at the grocery store, but it was $5 a pound and looked very dried up and old, and smelled strongly of mold. I asked several different produce managers about where it comes from and what it is used for. I finally got one produce manager who knew much about it and didn’t recommend the root on his own shelf. He sent me to an international market about 10 miles from my home. The produce manager there didn’t speak a lot of English, but he was able to give me some more detailed information.

The pound of taro root I purchased from him came from Florida, not what I would consider local, but it was not the Nigerian taro available at my grocery store. The skin on the root was bumpy but not wrinkled and looked fresh. The root smelled of fresh dirt. I brought it home, scrubbed it and poked a few holes in it before putting it in a 300° oven for two hours. When it was softened to the touch, much like a baked potato would be, I cut the corm in half, scooped out the insides and mashed them up. It was a little drier than I expected, and never did really soften up to the point I would have expected. Poi in Hawaii comes in “two finger” and “three finger” varieties, indicating how many fingers you need to scoop it up: three finger being more runny, two finger being more like pudding. Mine was more like hand-mashed potato.

I added a half tablespoon of sea salt and 2 tablespoons of whey and mashed a little more. After sitting, covered, on the kitchen counter for 24 hours, I refrigerated it. It was salty, but the buttery flavor still came through. It was very much like eating buttered popcorn without the corn flavor (or hulls in your teeth!)

I presented it to Rose on a cracker, just one small taste. She asked for more, so I made her a snack of several poi-topped crackers. That night at dinner when we all had the braised green tops of some leeks with cheese, she asked if she could put some poi on top of hers instead of cheese. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner! It really is very good!

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