Vanuatu's national dish — grated taro, cassava, or yam mixed with coconut milk into a thick paste, sometimes layered with meat (pork or chicken), wrapped in laplap leaves (heliconia or banana), and cooked in an earth oven for 2-3 hours. Sliced into thick wedges and eaten with meat juices.
Lap-lap is Vanuatu's universally-recognized national dish, prepared at every celebration across the 83 islands. Each island has its own preferred variant — Tanna uses pana yam, Efate uses taro, Espiritu Santo uses cassava.
Cut a wedge of lap-lap — dense pale-cream slab studded with meat chunks, glistening with coconut milk and meat juices, banana-leaf aroma rising. Bite: dense and slightly chewy from the grated tuber and coconut milk binding, the meat tender and infused with steam; the banana leaf's grassy fragrance throughout. The whole bite is creamy-starchy-savory — Vanuatu's unique earth-oven texture you can taste nowhere else. With a side of coconut milk, this is the Ni-Vanuatu national plate.
Grated tuber + coconut milk creates the binding paste. Banana leaves protect from direct heat while infusing aroma. Long earth-oven cooking sets the structure while keeping moist. The result is uniquely dense-yet-creamy.
Variations
With chicken instead of pork. With fish. With shrimp. With added pumpkin in tuber paste. With ginger. Vegetarian version. Tanna-style with pana yam.
On the Palate
Where Lap-Lap sits in the Vanuatu flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 6How it's made
13 steps · 50 min active · 130 min waiting
- 122 min
Peel and grate 1.5 kg taro (or cassava or yam) finely.
- 26 min
Squeeze grated tuber in cheesecloth to remove excess water (and toxic compounds if cassava).
- 34 min
Mix with 400 ml coconut milk + 1.5 tsp salt into a thick paste.
- 46 min
If meat version: cube 800 g pork shoulder; season with 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp pepper.
- 56 min
Cut 6-8 banana-leaf squares (or use heliconia leaves traditionally). Soften over flame.
- 62 min
Place a large banana leaf at the bottom of a deep baking dish or earth-oven pit.
- 73 min
Spread half the tuber paste in a 4-cm layer.
- 82 min
Layer meat on top.
- 92 min
Cover with remaining tuber paste.
- 104 min
Cover with banana leaves; seal tightly.
- 11152 min
Cook in oven at 175°C for 2.5 hours, or in earth oven for 2 hours.
- 1216 min
Cool 15 min; unwrap; slice into thick wedges.
- 132 min
Serve with meat juices and a side of coconut milk.
