Marshall Islands
Breadfruit, fermented bwiro and some of the world's most fish-heavy plates on low coral atolls.
Cooking on the Marshall Islands is atoll cooking — thin, sandy soil, no highlands, so the plate is built from the reef and a handful of hardy crops. Marshallese eat some of the highest volumes of fish on earth, reef catch and raw tuna sashimi straight from the lagoon, alongside breadfruit (mā) roasted or baked in the earth oven. The most distinctive dish is bwiro, ripe breadfruit pounded to a paste, wrapped in leaves and fermented for days before baking dense and tangy.
Coconut is total — flesh, milk, water (the national drink) and copra, the cash crop — while chewy orange pandanus keys are sucked for their juice or pressed into cakes that keep for years, drought insurance from leaner times. A century of US influence layered rice, tinned meat and doughnuts onto the everyday table. In Majuro you'll find sashimi and chicken-and-rice; on the outer atolls, you eat what the coconut and breadfruit trees provide.
- Breadfruit (mā)
- Reef fish and sashimi
- Bwiro (fermented breadfruit paste)
- Pandanus (bōb)
- Coconut crab and clams
- Jekaro (coconut-flower sap)
- Banana doughnuts
