Samoa's beloved coconut caramel taro dessert — boiled taro root bathed in a thick, dark, fragrant sauce of caramelized sugar and rich coconut cream. Sweet, dense, and deeply comforting.
Fa'ausi is one of Samoa's most cherished comfort foods — a dessert so simple in its components (taro, sugar, coconut cream) that its depth of flavor feels almost miraculous. It belongs to the category of foods that taste like childhood, like Sunday afternoons, like being somewhere you are completely safe. The taro used in Samoan cooking is not the small purple-fleshed taro of Hawaii or the gluey poi. Samoan taro — ta'amu or the smaller dalo variety — is a starchy, dense root with a nutty, slightly earthy flavor that becomes silky when boiled and absorbs flavors readily. It is the taro of the Sunday to'onai, the communal feast after church that structures Samoan weekly life. At the to'onai, fa'ausi might appear alongside palusami (taro leaves in coconut cream), chop suey, and roasted pig — a sweet note in a feast of savory. The magic of fa'ausi is the caramel. Coconut cream is added to caramelized sugar, which should terrify you slightly (burning sugar and liquid are a volatile combination) and then produces something extraordinary: a deep amber sauce, fragrant with toasted coconut and caramel, thick enough to coat the boiled taro. The taro absorbs this sauce as it sits, the starch drinking in the fat and sugar until each piece is dense and glossy and slightly sticky. In Samoa, fa'ausi is eaten warm and in large portions. It is not a small dessert.
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