Odd Eats- Papeda

Papeda… bleh

We’re going heading over to Southeast Asia for this edition of Odd Eats! In 2009, I was traveling in Indonesia, and ended up staying in a home with an Indonesian family on the island of Papua for a couple days. 

One of the days I was treated to a common Papuan food known as Papeda… Since it’s not really easy to describe I’m going to leave it to Wikipedia:

Papeda is made from sago starch. The Moluccans and Papuans acquire the starch by
felling the trunk of a sago palm tree, cutting it in half, and scraping the soft inner parts
of the trunk, the pith, producing a crude sago pith flour. This flour is then mixed with
water and squeezed to leach the starch from the flour.

 According to the facebook post with the image below my initial response was “food like glue”

Quite frankly I can’t think of a better description besides “flavorless slime that feels like a booger going down your throat”… I did eat the entire serving, but it was a challenge as the papeda wasn’t easy to cut into manageable bite size pieces & keep it on the spoon with the soup it was served with. 

ODD EAT Rating Scale | Papeda

Yum Factor - 2/5
Gross Factor- 4.5/5
Chance of Repeat Eat- 30%