Taro Mochi Cake from Hanalei Roadside Truck

Taro. Isn’t that some kind of sweet potato that’s made into expensive chips? Or a purplish goop, called poi, served at Hawaiian luaus that no one really eats?

I admit those were my assumptions until a recent trip to Kauai where I stumbled upon a divine sweet: a moist, spongy taro mochi cake made with coconut milk and rice flour that I bought from a roadside truck in Hanalei.

So enamored was I with this enchanting taro treat, that I signed on for a tour of the nearby family-run taro farm which produced the purple-flecked delicacy.

Following our guide through lush, windswept green fields among waving heart-shaped taro fronds, I learned that Hawaiian taro farmers face a host of challenges, including hurricanes, flash floods, hungry wild boar and an infestation of apple snails. But they persevere because taro has been a revered food in the islands for over a thousand years.

In fact, Hawaiian folklore considers taro to be “the elder brother” of all Hawaiians and since it is disrespectful to fight in front of an elder, when a bowl of poi is uncovered, all argument must stop.

Taro also happens to be one of the world’s earliest cultivated plants. Easily digestible, a good source of fiber, Vitamin C, E, B6, calcium, potassium and iron, it is featured in the cuisines of more than two-dozen countries from Brazil to China. Every part of the plant is cooked and consumed: leaves are stir-fried, steamed or made into soup; stems sautéed, boiled or ground; and the roots (technically termed corms) are steamed, fried, mashed, and appear in everything from appetizers to desserts.

When I said a tearful goodbye to my sweet little Hawaiian taro mochi cake and returned stateside, I set myself a quest -- I love quests -- to unearth (pardon the pun) a range of international dishes made from this worldwide staple. Shouldn’t be too hard in the mini-United Nations we call the East Bay.

Fried Taro Roll

First stop: Berkeley’s Green Papaya Thai Vegetarian Cuisine, a pleasant café with a long menu, for their fried taro appetizer, a generous plate of warm sliced taro roll made with tapioca and rice flours and red beans. Deep-fried in a paper-thin sheet of bean curd, its crispy golden skin contrasts nicely with the creamy filling, in a typical lavender-taro-hue.

Taro plays a starring role in many Chinese dishes, including a taro cake traditionally eaten for Chinese New Years. Even McDonald’s has caught on; their restaurants in China sell taro pies.

Two dim sum classics highlight the taro root. Squat squares of pan-fried taro cake are made from rice flour and dried scallops, shrimp, mushrooms and Chinese bacon or sausage. But the more eye-catching morsels are taro dumplings. These pork-filled balls have a wispy, lacy shell that results from deep-frying the thick coating of boiled mashed taro.

I recently sampled some yummy dumplings at Peony in Oakland Chinatown; with their fluffy, crunchy coating, it was like biting into a crispy cloud. (Hint: for the best experience, ask for them to be brought piping hot).

Vietnamese cuisine includes taro in spring rolls, soups, and desserts. Piedmont Avenue’s stylish Xyclo offers appetizers in which taro plays a supporting role; in their Xyclo roll, it’s tucked inside crispy, cigar shaped tubes along with finely chopped chicken, shrimp, carrots, mushrooms and glass noodles.

Besides poi, the sacred mixture of pounded taro root and water, the taro plant is an essential part of another Hawaiian culinary tradition: laulau, which utilizes its leaves. Pork or chicken and salted butterfish are wrapped in taro leaves and then enfolded in inedible ti leaves. The chunky green packages are steamed for several hours, turning the taro leaves to a soft, smoky (and vitamin rich) mush.

Berkeley’s Wiki Wiki Hawaiian BBQ serves up hefty portions of island favorites to the starving-student crowd. My pork laulau actually wasn’t too bad. When I inquired how they prepare it, I was told that frozen pre-made laulaus are shipped from Hawaii. Have with scoop of rice and macaroni salad for the full island experience.

For an easy DIY luau, head to Berkeley’s Tokyo Fish Market. They carry frozen Hawaiian pork or chicken laulau with no added chemicals or preservatives. You steam them at home.

On the sweet side, taro turns up in a myriad of mauve incarnations:
The ubiquitous taro bubble tea drink originated in Taiwan. Taro powder provides a thickener, a nutty taste and the light purple color. I’m partial to the bubble tea at Albany’s Tay Tah Café on Solano Avenue.

A warming Chinese dessert for a cold evening: chunks of cooked taro in a bowl of hot sago (think tapioca) pudding. My go-to unassuming Chinese dessert spot: Oakland’s Yummy Guide.

My teen-age daughter turned me on to my favorite taro treat: Yogurtland’s taro frozen yogurt. One of the regular flavors in their two Berkeley locations, its tartness forms the perfect base for fruit and topping creations.

I am not done trekking the taro trail; there are many ethnic taro specialties yet to taste:

Toranguk, a Korean soup traditionally served at Chuseok, the harvest holiday.

Sinigang, the tamarind-based national stew of the Philippines.

And a range of Indian regional dishes including leaf pancake, stem saag and a spicy taro curry with prawn.

Anyone know a good Maldivian restaurant? I hear natives of the Maldives (stunning islands in the Indian Ocean) eat their cooked taro with grated coconut, chili paste and fish soup.

Gabrielle Hamilton. Photo: Melissa Hamilton

Gabrielle Hamilton can write, there's no doubt about that. Craft infuses her recent bestseller, peppered as it is with references to both body and kitchen fluids.

Still, this writer was reluctant to read the memoir of this reluctant chef. When a book like Blood, Bones & Butter gets so much advance praise it's hard to believe it can live up to the hype.

Let's review, shall we? There was the excerpt in The New Yorker, a New York Times profile and laudatory reviews from the paper of record by Michiko Kakutani and Frank Bruni, along with glowing accounts in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Of course, the womens' glossies weighed in with pleasure, as did the blogosphere, including the Times (again), 5 Second Rule, and Bay Area Bites.

Top chefs chimed in too: Her book boasts bubbly blurbs from Bourdain, Batali, and Boulud.

Curious to find out what all the fuss was about, this reporter went to hear Hamilton speak at Omnivore Books in March, when she swung through town on book tour, and again last Thursday, when she appeared on stage in conversation with Kim Severson as part of the City Arts & Lecture series. Oh, and in between this reporter devoured her almost 300-page coming-of-age story.

The book is an indisputable page turner, but let's dispose of one major beef up front: The last section -- "Butter" -- feels rushed and not ready for prime time, in large part because the central concern -- the unraveling of her lonely marriage -- was not resolved in real time. No matter, the publisher wanted that memoir hitting the shelves pronto and mass marketing waits for no one. (Hamilton said Thursday that she's since addressed the marriage matter -- in life and on the page in an epilogue for the paperback edition, available in January.)

Clearly, the woman has a talent with pots and pens. The owner of Prune, a wildly popular little bistro in Manhattan's East Village, (the restaurant's title comes from a childhood nickname), Hamilton recently won a James Beard Award for best New York City chef after receiving nominations for the coveted title three years running. (Though some grumbled that the gal who serves Triscuits and canned sardines at the bar won more for what she represents than what she cooks.) She's written about the chef's life for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and Saveur, where her sister Melissa Hamilton was an editor, and appeared in six volumes of Best Food Writing.

Hamilton has worked hard and overcome obstacles to get to the top of her game, in two creative fields no less. She survived a largely feral childhood followed by a drug-fueled, unsupervised adolescence, turned to cooking to find family, home, hope, structure, and salvation and wound up, on a whim, running a restaurant of her own.

She's not interested in glamorizing either pursuit. If anything she has a tendency to martyrdom: Hamilton recounts cleaning human excrement off the restaurant stoop and deposing of a dead rat riddled with maggots found on the back steps. She turns hundreds of eggs on the breakfast line, while major-league pregnant and, later, with babies clinging to her breast. Her autobiography, a decade in the making, is scribbled on brown paper between services, on subway rides, and while putting those babes to bed. There is never enough time or sleep.

Professionally, Hamilton is a big talent and a huge success. Her personal life, as she reveals in her book, is a bit messier. Estranged from her mother for decades, she identifies as lesbian but ditched the sisterhood for a clandestine affair with an Italian man she ends up marrying. He is the father of her two boys, though from the beginning of their coupling trouble is brewing. For starters, Hamilton seems more in love with his mother and summer visits to the Italian clan's compound than her actual husband.

These personal revelations would seem meaty subjects for seasoned interviewer Kim Severson in her City Arts & Lectures discussion with Hamilton. But Severson -- now the New York Times' Atlanta bureau chief who appears to keep her hand in the food beat and her heart in San Francisco -- was in a tricky situation. Just days before Hamilton landed in town the New York Post had dropped a bombshell about the celebrity chef's love life.

Of course, who Hamilton sleeps with is really nobody else's business, except that her memoir includes revelations about her adventures in the sack as well as an apron. And Hamilton talks a lot about the value of being honest and authentic in the kitchen and on the page. To top it off, the New York Post item on Hamilton was recycled in the local food media the day before her appearance.

Severson gave a nod to the matter early on in the chat: "I'm going to ask you the question on everyone's minds, [theatrical pause] How do you keep your skin so dewy?" That set the tone for an evening of mostly softballs from Severson, who made a running gag about not being "bitter" that Hamilton's memoir was a better read than her own, Spoon Fed.

The Times staffer did try some shock value, noting the book's unusual intimacy, which a friend described to Severson this way: "I feel like I know every fold in her vagina." But she quickly found herself in the role of comforting colleague, after an earthquake literally shook the subdued Hamilton, who looked like she wanted to bolt from the stage when things started rocking.

A few sips of wine later, however, Hamilton regained her composure and temporarily shut down Severson, as she meandered through her self-described cliched questions. Case in point: "What's the last taste you would want in your mouth before you die?" Surely not the first time Hamilton's fielded that query.

"I thought we were going to have an intelligent conversation about writing and you want to know if I keep lube in my bedside table," Hamilton scolded at one point. Note to Linda Hunt: Not all KQED subscribers may be amused by the repartee between these two, who wondered if any couple, regardless of orientation, can keep sex alive in a long-term relationship -- though, it must be said, the crowd at Herbst Theater ate it up.

During the audience Q&A fans gushed about how much they loved Hamilton's book, even if they hadn't finished it, and her restaurant, even if they hadn't eaten there yet. In such an environment, this reporter felt it would have been a hostile act to ask the writer-chef if she cared to comment about the recent allegations in the press. Instead, she opted for the more discreet email follow up to both Hamilton and Severson, neither of whom jumped at the opportunity to explain why the subject wasn't broached on stage.

Hardly surprising. Hamilton made it clear at her book signing at Omnivore that she's selective about what aspects of her private life the public get to know about through her writing. Her mantra: If it's not in there, it's not tellable -- readers don't get all of her. Fair enough.

It's this kind of contradiction -- the tell-all that keeps secrets -- that makes Hamilton such a fascinating creature. She's full of inconsistencies -- aren't we all? -- only hers are on display for all the world to see and hear. Hamilton often says she loathes being called "a female chef" and yet when TV came calling looking for just such a demographic, she jumped at the chance to take one for the team.

Similarly she thinks the term "food writer" is demeaning; she's simply a chef who is also a scribe and cooking is what allowed her to come to the party. Yet, when asked what readers can expect next from the literary writer she responds: A cookbook.

During the talk Hamilton mentions the moms at her sons' school, who she says look at her disdainfully as she drops off her kids. Her children eat poorly and often in the car on the way to school, she confesses. And yet, one can't help but get the impression that the 45-year-old looks down her nose at them. Severson counters that perhaps the other moms are intimidated or awed by the successful chef with the best-selling memoir but Hamilton dismisses this notion out of hand.

And the Beard Award is silly, Hamilton says, until she wins it, and then it's the most important culinary honor a chef can earn. Thankfully she has a sense of humor about all this flip-flopping.

One gets the sense that Hamilton doesn't give a hoot if you like her, agree with her opinions, or want to read her book. It's what makes her intriguing and may well be an essential part of why she's so talented on the page and in the kitchen. She's just doing her own thing and not seeking anyone else's praise or approval.

During the course of the 90-minute City Arts & Lectures dialogue she laments the fetishization of food (the cult of farmers' markets, home cooks with sous vide machines), discussions of gender issues in restaurant kitchens (snoozeville), and the plethora of social media around food culture. Reading about food online, she says, is like eating at McDonalds. "You end up feeling hungry, undernourished, tired, and full of self loathing."

She's also down on the rise of reality TV cooking shows, even though she's had her own turn in front of the camera. (She slayed Bobby Flay on "Iron Chef"). "It's starting to suck for all of us, since TV isn't about cooking it's about entertaining," says Hamilton. "It's impossible to be quiet or subtle with food on television because actual cooking is really quite dull and repetitive."

Plans for a movie based on the memoir are already in the works, Hamilton told fans Thursday. She jokes she'd like to see Robert Downey Jr. play her.

That seems about right. Hamilton has balls. And a muscularity to her convictions and craft that the actor could convey handsomely. Audiences with a taste for Hamilton's contrarian ways might just go for such gender-bending casting. Stay tuned.

Listen to the conversation between Gabrielle Hamilton and Kim Severson broadcast on KQED Sunday, November 27 at 1 p.m.