Big Island Big Eats

Intro Welcome to the third episode of Big Island Big Eats, the Hawaii Island food podcast. Today’s episode is all about pineapple! We’re going to walk you through how to pick one and what to do with every part of it. Picking a Pineapple Recently the county of Hawaii stopped recycling all plastics except for bottle deposits. This got me thinking about trying for more zero waste options. Pineapples are a great choice for zero waste. First, you don’t have to put them in a plastic produce bag. They are perfectly fine just sitting there au natural. Second, you can use all parts of the fruit, from the leaves at the top to the peels, which we’ll get into later. Finally on Hawaii Island they are pretty reasonably priced, generally about a dollar a pound. Apples, for comparison, run about $3.50 per pound or more. It’s good to eat local! Picking a pineapple at the store can be a daunting task. It is a big investment, both in size and cost, but looking for a few things can help you pick

Here's a teaser for our upcoming podcast episodes. Pineapple--everything from slicing to growing to brewing! Holiday episode--We'll have a review of a popular Hilo holiday buffet, we'll pit some top Pinterest party appetizer recipes against each other in a cooking showdown, and we'll share some island tweaks to some of Patrick's favorite holiday drinks. If you have a holiday food event on Hawaii Island coming up, let us know! We'd love to chat about it. Drop us an email at bigislandbigeats AT gmail.com or leave us a voice message:  https://anchor.fm/bigisland-bigeats

Introduction There is nothing quite as local as poke. Go into any grocery store in Hawaii and you’ll find a display case full of pans and pans of raw, chopped ahi, marlin, or other fresh local fish in an array of sauces and seasonings. It’s about as ubiquitous as cans of spam and Locals-brand flip flops (called slippahs here). It’s served in a bowl, usually with a couple of scoops of rice, some furikake, and maybe a helping of ocean salad on the side. Sometimes you can even get it with purple sweet potato salad or slices of pineapple tossed with li hing mui (more on that in a later episode). A poke bowl basically has everything you need in a meal. Poke is, of course, different from and similar to other raw fish dishes with which you might be familiar. It shares some commonalities with ceviche in that they both feature raw fish and a few diced vegetables in a  light sauce. Poke relies less on getting “cooked” by the sauce though, which pretty much defines ceviche: h