Luau Party Recipe Ideas Easy to Make Delicious Foods
With these luau party recipe ideas, you can make all the food for a Hawaiian luau in the comfort of your own home! Mention luau and what comes to mind? Lots of pineapples, coconuts, roasted pig, poi and poke. You can plan a strictly traditional luau or aim for a more contemporary luau menu.
Here are some traditional luau party recipe ideas :
Kalua Pig
Chicken Long Rice
Lomi Lomi Salmon
Poi
Baked Sweet potato
Tropical fruit salad
Haupia
Mai-tais
For a more modern slant on your luau, draw from Hawaii’s multicultural cooking.
Remember that seafood is very important in Hawaii so you cannot go wrong with grilled salmon and pineapple slices or even a tuna and macaroni salad!
Hawaiian food is very colorful and aromatic and is sprinkled with influences from Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean cooking.
So how about including spring rolls, teriyaki chicken, Korean kalbi and sushi on colorful tropical-themed plates? Give your guests chopsticks and brightly colored plastic forks, play some popular Hawaiian music and everyone will think they are in Hawaii!
Recipes from Famous Hawaiian Chefs
Cutting-edge Hawaiian celebrity chef Alan Wong broke new ground once again by authoring a cookbook entitled New Wave Luau.
Draw inspiration from his ideas and serve kalua pig with Li Hing Mui chutney, pair curried chicken lumpia with a mango salad and tempt your guests with a guava sorbet.
Spring a surprise on your guests with a kalua pig nacho topped with chili-spiked guacamole!
Or, take a lead from Hawaii’s larger-than-life celebrity chef Sam Choy. Inject fun and zest into your luau party recipe ideas and be willing to experiment. You might like the results!
Sam Choy is also an author of several cookbooks on Hawaiian cooking and the host of a cooking show. He developed the following recipe as a twist on a traditional luau dish, using marlin for its firmer texture.
Fried Poke Salad
5 oz. marlin
1 tsp. shoyu
cup round onion, chopped
1 tsp. green onion
1 cup ogo seaweed
1 tsp. sesame oil enough salad oil to coat bottom of wok or skillet
1 or 2 handfuls of mixed salad greens
Cut the marlin into inch cubes. Add shoyu, onion, green onions, ogo, and sesame oil. Mix well. In a wok on high heat, quickly sear marlin cubes for no more than a minute or two in hot oil, making sure not to overcook. You want the fish raw in the middle.
Sam Choy recommends serving this hot on a bed of salad greens dressed with either his Creamy Oriental Dressing or Wasabi Vinaigrette.
Mango-Lilikoi-Basil Barbecue Shrimp
For other fun luau party recipe ideas, how about Sam’s Hilo Mango-Lilikoi-Basil Barbecue Shrimp? This can be cooked on the grill in the backyard if you are hosting your luau party outdoors.
The recipe is for four servings.
1 pound shrimp(about 16 to 20)
2 large mangoes, each cut in 6 large chunks
Marinade:
cup mango purée
cup frozen lilikoi concentrate, thawed
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp minced fresh basil
1 tbsp chopped fresh dill
1 tsp minced fresh ginger
1 tsp of minced garlic
Peel and devein shrimp, leaving tails on. Combine marinade ingredients and marinate shrimp 1 hour.
On each of 4 skewers, alternately thread shrimp and mango chunks.
Grill or broil kebabs 7 minutes or until shrimp is cooked – turning once and basting occasionally with marinade.
As these top chefs have shown, there are no limits to what you can come up with in planning your luau party recipe ideas. The fun is as much in the experimenting as it is in the cooking.
The cooked food is shipped in an insulated foam cooler and is surrounded by gel ice packs to preserve its shelf life.
You can receive the food just two days after it is cooked! The packages will arrive semi-chilled so make sure you refrigerate them immediately. All you have to do is to heat the food just before the party starts.
The frozen food has a long shelf life and can be frozen for up to six months in most cases. Also, the food is delivered with very detailed instructions for microwaving or steaming the food ahead of your party.
The recipe is for four servings.
