National Dish · Root Vegetable Casserole
Lap Lap
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Lenzo Nimoho / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
There's no single recipe — lap lap can be made with taro, yam, banana, or cassava depending on which island you're on.
Lap lap is grated root vegetable — taro, yam, banana, or manioc — mixed with coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaves, and traditionally baked in an underground stone oven called an uma, often with meat, chicken, or fish layered on top. It's sold at market stalls like Port Vila's Market House.
Why it's made this way: Wrapping the grated paste in banana leaves let cooks bake a filling, coconut-rich meal directly among hot stones or embers without any pots, a practical solution across Melanesian islands long before imported cookware arrived.
Roughly what's in it
500kcal
15gprotein
60gcarbs
22gfat
Estimated per typical street-vendor portion — not lab-tested.
More from Vanuatu
Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries.
Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below.
Photo credits.