Vanuatu

Oceania · This week's dish comes from Efate (Port Vila)

About Vanuatu

Vanuatu's cuisine is rooted in root crops and the earth oven, epitomized by laplap, grated taro or yam baked in banana leaves with coconut cream. Fresh fish, tropical fruit, and communal cooking define island life.

Laplap is a paste rather than a dish of pieces: taro, yam, breadfruit or banana grated on a stone or a spiral of bamboo, spread on banana leaves with coconut cream and often pork, beef, chicken or flying fox laid in, then wrapped and buried under hot stones. The communal stone-oven feast around it is called a bunia and is a kastom event.

Kava is not a novelty here but a nightly institution, drunk at dusk in low-lit nakamals where conversation drops to a murmur out of respect for the drink. Pentecost and Tanna are the two islands where the greatest number of cultivars were developed, and the traditions at the northern and southern ends of the archipelago are distinct enough that researchers treat them separately.

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

This week's dish: Nalot (Pounded Breadfruit with Coconut Cream)

Roasted breadfruit pounded to a smooth, heavy paste and served with a well of hot coconut cream poured into the middle.

Serves 4 · Prep 20 min · Cook 45 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 Vanuatu 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. Nalot (Pounded Breadfruit with Coconut Cream) comes from Efate (Port Vila), in Vanuatu. 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 Nalot (Pounded Breadfruit with Coconut Cream). How have the people, trade routes, and history of Vanuatu shaped what ends up on the plate there?

4. Compare Nalot (Pounded Breadfruit with Coconut Cream) to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Vanuatu about how they make and share it?

5. After you cook Nalot (Pounded Breadfruit with Coconut Cream), add Vanuatu 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 Nalot (Pounded Breadfruit with Coconut Cream) 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.