Waipahu market satisfies Polynesian food cravings

Everybody needs a taste of home, but those from Samoa likely have discovered that restaurants serving their cuisine can be few and far between. Sometimes just getting the proper ingredients to prepare the food on their own can be a challenge.

But folks in and around Waipahu don’t have that problem. They have Tammy’s Polynesian Market, where mainstay ingredients line the shelves and cooks deliver some 20 hot items daily, plus other baked goods popular with the larger community.

Prepared items are the real deal, not some westernized version of Polynesian cooking. There are whole bulbs and enormous chunks of kalo (taro), uala (sweet potato) and tapioca, boiled and then cooked in coconut milk. Baked taro is also offered up solo, as are whole cooked bananas, served as a starch accompaniment. There’s also the staple dish called palusami — taro leaves cooked in coconut milk — and corned beef in various forms, from braised brisket to the canned version. The latter is included in such dishes as sapasui, a Samoan chop suey made with long rice and the Palm brand corned beef from Australia that’s integral to Samoan cooking.

And whether you’re having an entire meal from Tammy’s or just a snack, there’s always panipopo, a large baked bun doused heavily in a creamy coconut sauce. It’s a pastry the market is known for, and folks come from far and wide for their fix.

About the business: In the 1970s and early ’80s, prior to its current ownership, this market at the corner of Farrington Highway and Awalau Street was known as Tuli’s Market. In 1986 Sun Ae Kim, known as Tammy, bought the space. She renamed it Baracao Liquor and Grocery Store, after her husband. In 1993 she changed the moniker to JS Market; then, finally, in 1999, the market got its current name.

Kim began serving hot food when customers who came in to buy Palm corned beef began asking for taro and banana, two staples of the Samoan diet, said her daughter, Gail Baracao.

Kim’s husband asked customers how to cook a few dishes, and he experimented at home. If they turned out well, he’d bring them to the store for customers to try. Eventually, Kim built a kitchen in the store and hired cooks, and the lineup of prepared food grew.

How to order: Items are sold by the pound for between $4.99 and $6.99, or by the plate at roughly $6.49 a pound.

What to order: Starches include the various preparations of taro, sweet potato, tapioca and banana. Entrees are rotated; on a recent visit offerings included a beef stir-fry, Samoan sausage in gravy, pig’s feet curry, fish with coconut milk, fresh corned beef, sapasui, turkey tail and lamb dishes such as flap meat, lamb stew and baked lamb.

Whatever you do, don’t miss the panipopo for dessert. And if you like, there’s usually a shelf full of freshly baked Samoan bread that doesn’t look a whole lot different from regular loaves, but manager James Razumich says it’s loaded with butter.

Grab and go: This is a tiny neighborhood market with a long hot-entree table inside, so the food is strictly to go. A tiny parking lot is immediately behind the market on Awalau Street, fronting K’s Bento-Ya.