I actually cooked food from Palau last weekend, but I'm just getting around to posting this now.
Palau is a tiny island country in Oceania, relatively close to the Philippines and Guam. It's actually comprised of more than 500 islands. As with most countries in Oceania, it was pretty tough to find veg-friendly recipes. Taro is an important staple, but I'm saving that for another country. Their national dish is fruit bat soup. Yep, made from actual fruit bats.
The first sentence on the small Wikipedia blurb about Palauan cuisine is about a dessert called "tama" so I figured that would be the way to go.
The "blog," if you can call it that, where I got this recipe was for plain tama, but I quickly learned from the comments under the recipe that people who grew up on tama always had it with banana, which is actually called "tama tuu." I decided I had to use this version as well.
I didn't find any distinct tama tuu recipes, but I did find a similar recipe from Samoa called panikeke, which used bananas and no eggs, so I ended up just substituting most of the eggs in the original recipe with some super ripe bananas.
The recipe called for 4 eggs, so I used 3 bananas and added one egg just in case it needed it to keep the texture right. After mashing the banana and adding the egg, a bit of vanilla is stirred in, along with milk.
In another bowl, flour is mixed with sugar, baking powder, and salt. The wet and dry ingredients are folded together. The resulting batter is very similar in texture (and probably taste) to pancake batter.
Next, a bunch of oil is heated on the stove. I used a full bottle plus of vegetable oil to get it deep enough to fry. If I used a smaller pot I'm sure I wouldn't need as much, but this way I was able to fry quite a few at a time.
I dropped a small spoonful of batter as a test--it started browning and rose to the surface immediately. My oil was definitely too hot. Since I don't have a thermometer I can use, I just have to guess at it.
The first few I made were a bit on the dark side, but they still tasted pretty dang good.
The outside was nice and crispy, with a light and fluffy interior.
The next few I dropped in cooked a lot more evenly after I lowered the heat. The amount of dough in the pot helped lower the heat as well. With this next batch, I used the top of the batter as a test for when to flip them. Just like with pancakes, you cook one side while watching the exposed side start to cook and firm up as well. You can sort of see the air bubbles on the top like you would see on pancakes.
Once I cooked a couple batches, I got the hang of it pretty well. I noticed that some of the smaller ones would actually flip on their own when they were ready, I'm guessing once the uncooked batter on the top became heavier than the air-filled bottom. It was kind of fun standing there watching them flip over.
Even though the batter was dropped into the oil pretty misshapen, the baking powder helped puff them out into little round balls. Some rounder than others, but it just depended on how much batter I used.
Speaking of batter, the recipe I used made a ton of these things. I made 3 dozen on Sunday night, we ate a few for dessert and I brought rest to work. I still had a couple cups of batter left (I was getting tired of standing over a pot of boiling oil) so I made the rest of it on Monday. Not caring as much about uniformity, I ended up with some really weirdly shaped ones. That cornucopia on the left was my favorite. The rest of the batter made about a dozen more bigger balls (or other shapes).
I probably could have cut the recipe in half, but 1) I had two bunches of ripe bananas to use up and 2) I wouldn't be able to share as many with my coworkers! Speaking of which, everybody loved them. I mean, they're basically little banana doughnuts, so who wouldn't like them?
I served them with some chocolate sauce and flaked coconut when I had them on Sunday night, but honestly they were even better just plain. They were better right out of the hot oil, with their crispy bits, but were still amazing a day later.
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