Paifala

Stage 1:
1. Start by preheating the oven to 375 F.
2. Next, take a small sauce pot and add your pineapple, coconut sugar, coconut milk, cinnamon and nutmeg to the pot before putting it over the heat. Lightly mix the ingredients.
3. With all the ingredients in the pot, put the sauce pot over medium-low heat and begin to heat up the filling. Be sure to stir well as the flavors start to heat up and mix.
4. After 1-2 minutes, lower the heat to a simmer, and let the filling mixture simmer for 2-3 minutes. Stir occasionally but you’ll focus more on the arrowroot powder.
5. In a small bowl, mix your arrowroot powder and leftover pineapple juice until the arrowroot is dissolved and you have a paste. You can use water here instead of pineapple juice if you’d like. The real goal is just to get the arrowroot into a paste before adding to filling.
6. Add the arrowroot paste to the filling and stir thoroughly. After another 1 minute of stirring, take the sauce pot off the heat and let the filling cool.

Stage 2:
1. As the sauce cools, start to make the crust by adding the pastry flour, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl. Use your hand to mix the dry ingredients together.
2. Take your butter and break it into smaller pieces, then add these smaller pieces to your bowl of dry ingredients.
3. With your hands, mix the butter and dry ingredients in together. Try to mix as much of the butter and as much of the flour together as you can.
4. Bit by bit, add the coconut milk to the batter. Be sure to mix the coconut milk into the batter as you add it.
5. Once you add all the coconut milk, mix all together and form a ball out of the dough.

Stage 3:
1. Flour a large baking sheet.
2. Place the dough onto the baking sheet and roll it out to about the size of an 8 1/2 inch cake pan. You can use the cake pan as a guide. Be sure to flour both cake pan and rolling pin well (even re-flouring as needed), because this dough mixture is very wet.
3. Once you’ve covered the entire surface area, cut off the excess pieces in order to get your circular shape of dough.
4. In the middle of the dough, spoon your filling in. You will have some filling left over, but expect to use probably 80% of what you’ve made. You don’t want to overfill it, though, otherwise the pastry will burst in the oven.

Stage 4:
1. Fold one side of dough over to the other, creating your semicircular shape.
2. With a fork, close your pie by pressing down along the edges to seal the seams together. Use your finger and run over the edges with a little bit of water to help keep it bound together once you press it.
3. Make several holes in the center of the pie. This will help the inside cook evenly.
4. Place in the oven to cook for 20 minutes. If you choose not to put an egg wash over the pie, then cook it for the full 40 minutes and ignore the next stage

Stage 5:
1. If you do make use of an egg wash, beat your egg in a bowl and add the water.
2. At the 20 minute mark, take your moon pie out and brush egg wash along the top and sides of the paifala. Especially on the sides since this will help keep it bound throughout the rest of the baking process.
3. Place paifala back in the oven for another 20 minutes until the paifala is nice and golden brown.

Recipe adapted from Samoa Food.