Samoa eat · Eating in Samoa
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Eating in Samoa
Eating in Samoa
Eating is an extremely important part of Samoan life, as the size of many Samoans may suggest. They often take food with them when they travel. Samoan food is not highly spiced or seasoned. It uses ingredients that are relatively unfamiliar to most Westerners, such as breadfuit, taro (or talo), taro leaves, cooked green bananas and raw fish.
Umu. The umu is the traditional method used for cooking. A fire is built and stones placed on it. When the fire is down to the embers the ingredients, such as green bananas, breadfruit, taro, fish, palusami and pork are placed on the stones. It is then covered with banana leaves and left to cook.
Oka is the way Samoans prepare raw fish. It consists of small bits of fish that are marinated in a mixture of lemon juice, coconut cream, salt and finely chopped onions.
Palusami is made from taro leaves and coconut cream. The coconut cream, onions and some taro are wrapped in whole taro leaves and cooked in an umu. Well cooked, this can be unforgettable and you should not leave Samoa without trying it.
Corned beef. Samoa rapidly adopted this import and it is widely used as an accompaniment to Umus and other dishes.
Unfortunately it is difficult to find these delicacies, maybe partly because western food is more “cool”, partly because the average tourist wants to eat what he eats at home. The usual things you get is more or less good imitations of western-style or Chinese food. The market in Apia is a good place if you want to try some of the local stuff. It's also a good idea to stock up on fruit there before heading anywhere on the islands.
Most restaurants are casual and not too expensive. Places to eat are listed in the pages for Upolu, Apia and Savaii. Outside of Apia, most of the best places are associated with hotels or resorts.
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Samoa Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.