A FOOD TRADITION
Hawaiian cuisine
Hawaiian cuisine combines Native Hawaiian foodways with influences from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, and other plantation communities. Traditional staples include taro, sweet potato, breadfruit, coconut, fish, pork, seaweed, and fermented foods, while later local cooking adds rice, noodles, soy, and preserved meats. Characteristic methods include imu earth-oven cooking, pounding, steaming, fermenting, grilling, and salting. Representative foods include poi with laulau, kalua pig, and lomi salmon. The term covers both Native Hawaiian traditions and the broader local cuisine that emerged through plantation-era cultural exchange, rather than simply describing generic Pacific or Asian American cooking.
Dishes linked to this cuisine
1–8 of 8
evil jungle prince
Explore the dish and its connections.
Hawaiian haupia
A chilled coconut-milk pudding set into soft, gelatin-like pieces.
Hawaiian kūlolo
A dense, sweet Hawaiian dessert based on pounded kalo and sugar.
Hawaiian laulau
A bundle of meat or fish enclosed in soft lū‘au leaves and steamed until tender.
Hawaiian poi
A purple-hued Hawaiian staple made by pounding cooked kalo, or taro root, into a smooth paste.
Kālua pua‘a
Whole pork cooked slowly in a Hawaiian imu earth oven and shredded for serving.
Lomi-lomi salmon
A Hawaiian side dish of salted salmon massaged together with chopped tomato and diced onion.
Traditional Hawaiian poke
Raw fish cut into pieces and seasoned traditionally with shoyu, green onion, candlenut and limu seaweed.
Catalogue preview Cuisine connections may be unreviewed. Regional comparisons include their food references and do not establish the ingredients of a particular meal.