Tuvalu

Oceania · This week's dish comes from Funafuti

About Tuvalu

Tuvalu's atoll food is built on coconut, fish, and root crops like pulaka (swamp taro), often baked in an earth oven. The sweet pulaka-and-coconut pudding fekei is a favorite on these low Pacific islands.

Pulaka is the same giant swamp taro that Kiribati calls babai, grown in pits cut down towards the water table. Tuvalu preserves by drying rather than by fermenting, because a high brackish water table makes deep fermentation pits impossible, so the Marshallese method of burying breadfruit does not transfer here.

The sweet puddings are a family with a shared prefix: solopulaka, solotaro and solomei, made by grating the root or the breadfruit, mixing it with coconut cream, and baking it in the umu until it sets. Fekei belongs to that group, and the coconut in it is grated and squeezed rather than opened from a tin.

The wider picture: Island kitchens where coconut and the sea rule.

This week's dish: Puleleti (Coconut and Coconut Syrup Sweet)

A chewy Tuvaluan coconut candy, fresh grated coconut cooked down with sweet coconut toddy syrup until thick, sticky and glossy.

Serves 8 · Prep 10 min · Cook 15 min · Difficulty: easy

See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →

Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.

Discussion prompts

1. Find Tuvalu on a world map or globe. It sits in Oceania. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?

2. Puleleti (Coconut and Coconut Syrup Sweet) comes from Funafuti, in Tuvalu. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?

3. Read the short story behind Puleleti (Coconut and Coconut Syrup Sweet). How have the people, trade routes, and history of Tuvalu shaped what ends up on the plate there?

4. Compare Puleleti (Coconut and Coconut Syrup Sweet) to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Tuvalu about how they make and share it?

5. After you cook Puleleti (Coconut and Coconut Syrup Sweet), add Tuvalu to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.

🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers

🍽 Open the full Puleleti (Coconut and Coconut Syrup Sweet) recipeServings dial, dietary swaps for every table, and its own print button.

🍳 Kitchen SchoolShort lessons on the core skills the recipes lean on.

📋 More teacher resourcesThe printable passport, how to run Country of the Week, and every country page.