Taro (kalo)—Specialty Crop Profile
The primary food products from Colocasia taro throughout much of the Pacific islands for both subsistence and commercial purposes include: corm, leaves, and petiole, which can be prepared in a number of ways. The corm is boiled in water, baked, fried, or steamed in underground earth ovens (known in various languages as imu, umu, um, and lovo). The leaves and petioles are often boiled and served as a kind of spinach.
In Fiji, the petioles are boiled and served with coconut cream in a dish known as basese. Often as in Samoa and Fiji, the leaves are steamed with coconut cream, onions, and sometimes with corned beef in a dish called palusami. Taro features in traditional desserts such as the Samoan fa‘ausi or the Hawaiian kūlolo, which consist of grated, cooked taro mixed with coconut milk and brown sugar. In Vanuatu, it has been reported that taro flowers are used to make a soup.
In Hawai‘i, laulau, consisting of meat, fish, and/or vegetables wrapped in taro leaves is bundled in the leaves of ti and steamed. Ninety-five percent of the taro produced in Hawai‘i in 2006 was used in making poi, a sticky paste made from the boiled taro corms. Poi is also canned/bottled as a hypoallergenic baby food and a freeze-dried poi powder has also been produced. The Hawaiian cultivar Maui Lehua is mainly used for making poi, while the most common upland cultivar, Bun Long (also called Chinese taro) is not.
Other products made from the corms include chips, flour, ice cream, breakfast cereals, flakes, noodles, canned taro, and meal. In Palau, shochu (a Japanese-type of vodka), is reported to be distilled from taro.
Agroforestry
While taro can be found growing in pure upland (dry) and wetland monocultures (e.g., lo‘i in Hawai‘i), it is often found as an understory species in recently established swiddens (slash and burn gardens), along with yam and other crops that require fertile soils. In the Maring culture area of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, these daang-wan duk (taro-yam gardens) are succeeded by longer lived species more tolerant of less fertile soils such sweet potato, banana, sugar cane, etc. Monoculture production of taro tends only to occur for export production, such as in Fiji. In many countries in the Pacific, taro is a very common home/backyard garden crop and is grown with other crops/species, more in an agroforestry system.
Original source of this article
This article is excerpted by permission of the publisher from
Manner, H.I., and M. Taylor. 2011. Taro (Colocasia esculenta). In: Elevitch, C.R. (ed.). Specialty Crops for Pacific Island Agroforestry. Permanent Agriculture Resources (PAR), Holualoa, Hawai‘i. © Permanent Agriculture Resources.