Big Island Grinds

Ahhhh beef luau. One of my favorite dishes ever! Beef, luau leaves, water, salt… maybe an onion… and that’s it. Aren’t the simplest dishes always the best?

This weekend I had a mean craving for this (it might’ve been because of all the Hilo rain). The problem was that I never really made this myself before and searching the google internet machine resulted in no success either.

Why is it so hard to find a recipe for this? Luckily, the helpful guys at the HawaiiThreads.com KauKau Corner were nice to help me out. *s*

I used some of the tips they gave me and adapted it for the pressure cooker. Normally this dish would take 3-4 hours, but with a pressure cooker, only 1-1.5 hours.

Ingredients:

- 1lb Luau Leaves
- 2lb Beef Brisket
- Water
- Good handful of Hawaiian Salt
- 1 Large Onion sliced thinly

First step is to prepare the luau leaves.

Just make sure to cut out the big vein section that connects to the stem. Some people take all the veins out, but it’s really not necessary.

Next, pressure cook the leaves in water for 5-10 minutes (boil ~15-20 minutes if no pressure cooker).  I’m not too sure how much this helps, but it is supposed to make the dish “cleaner tasting”.

Then drain out the brownish water which has all that itchy-mouth stuff.

For the beef I used bone-in brisket because it’s a great stewing meat with good fat content which enhances this dish. Having the bone still on creates a richer broth. Cost-U-Less in Hilo has good deals on this. If you don’t have brisket, any good stewing beef would work just as good. Note: You may want to trim some of the fat if your cut is very fatty.

Brown the brisket.

Throw in a large chopped onion sliced thinly.

Saute for a few minutes.

Next, add some water and scrape all the brown yum-yums off the bottom of the pot. Then mix in the luau leaves and add enough water to cover. Yeah, my pressure cooker was too small for this.

Pressure cook for about 50 minutes. 3 hours if no pressure cooker.

The kitchen should now smell onolicious! Open up the pressure cooker and taste test the luau leaves. Are they still a little tough? Do they make your mouth itchy? If so, you need to cook it some more until it’s tender, moist and clean-tasting.

Once the leaves are all tender, add hawaiian salt to taste.

I added more water since I wanted it a more soupy consistency…

Grindage time!!!

Serve with rice or poi, raw maui onions and chili peppa water on da side. I think I going eat some more now…

Much mahalos to da guys at HawaiiThreads.com!

This entry was posted by James on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Hawaiian, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.