Oil Down (Breadfruit and Taro Leaves Cooked Down in Coconut Milk)

Variations

• Without taro leaves: spinach or chard will do, but the timing changes with them. Neither survives 45 minutes, so they have to go in for the last 15, and then the leaf is a garnish rather than a layer. It is more honest to call that a different dish than a substitution.
• Without meat: leave out the salt pork and chicken and add mushrooms and pumpkin. The coconut oil still comes out the same way, but all of the saltiness goes with the pork, so season at the end of step 6.
• With salt cod: many households use it. Soak it overnight as well, and add it for the last 15 minutes of step 5 so it does not break up.
• Without breadfruit: green plantain or a waxy potato will stand in. Potato goes much softer much faster, so add it 20 minutes into step 5.
• A dish with a similar name: in the Caribbean "callaloo" means the taro leaves themselves, or a soup made from them. Calulu is an Angolan dish that happens to sound alike.

Tips

• The taro leaves go in first and cook longest, and the reason is not texture. Calulu sorts greens by how fast they collapse — "Spinach is the easiest but collapses fast, so add it for the last 15 minutes; kale and chard can go in from the start" — that is, the tenderer the leaf the later it goes in. Taro leaf is tender and goes in first anyway and cooks for an hour, because it is not being cooked to soften. Taro leaves carry needle-shaped crystals of calcium oxalate, which sting the mouth and throat if the leaf is undercooked and which only break down under long heat. The 45 minutes in step 5 is a floor, not a preference.
• Ndole solves the same kind of problem the opposite way. There, "wringing it through changes of water is how that bitterness comes out" — the bitter compounds dissolve in water, so water is the answer and heat has nothing to do with that stage. Calcium oxalate does not dissolve, so rinsing a taro leaf all afternoon changes nothing. The two leaves want opposite preparation because what has to come out of them is a different kind of thing.
• The same Caribbean pot can reach the opposite conclusion. The ackee in Ackee and Saltfish does not become safe by being cooked, so there "The instruction is a refusal rather than a technique". With taro leaves, cooking is the technique. Neither ingredient lets you skip the preparation, but one of them is a matter of choosing and the other is a matter of heat.
• The coconut milk breaking is already explained by Rendang, which says "The coconut milk splitting is the doneness sign, where elsewhere it is the failure to avoid". That moment is what this dish is named after and it is physically the same event. What differs is what absorbs the oil that is released. In rendang the meat sits in it and takes on a dry surface; here the breadfruit and the dumplings act as a sponge and the oil goes into the starch. A finished pot with almost no visible free oil in it is correct, not a fault.
• Layering and not stirring is also Calulu's point — "not stirring is the only way the fish stays in pieces". Here the reason is the leaves rather than the fish. One stir and the cooked taro leaf disperses, the liquid turns uniformly green, and there is no longer any way to see how far each layer has got. To check the base in step 6, tilt the pot instead of stirring it.
• Breadfruit is a fruit used as a potato. It is picked mature but before it ripens and turns sweet and soft. At that stage the flesh is starchy enough to hold its shape through an hour in the pot while it drinks the liquid around it. Frozen breadfruit works and goes into step 4 without thawing.
• Season after step 6, not before. The liquid reduces to about a third, so anything seasoned to taste in step 5 will be salty at the end. That is the same reason step 1 soaks the salt out of the pork overnight.