Homemade POG

The original POG.

I don’t normally eat breakfast when I’m home. A latte and a banana or something similar usually suffices. But when I travel I like to go to the local roadside café just to see what the down-home cooking is like. Since the islands are so multi-cultural, it’s not surprising that the traditional Hawaiian breakfast, loco moco, includes rice covered with a hamburger and gravy, crowned with a fried egg.  It’s fun to try once but it’s not my favorite breakfast.

I much prefer some brown rice with Portuguese sausage (linguica, which is what my little Portuguese grandmother always served me for breakfast when I visited her house), and some fresh fruit like pineapple and papaya. Oh, and POG.

POG (passion fruit, orange, guava) is, to me, what Hawaii tastes like. I think I had it the first time I visited Maui, back in the early 80s, and have been addicted to it ever since.

POG was created by a woman named Mary Soon who worked as a food consultant for the Haleakala Dairy on Maui (since closed down) but it was made famous by Meadow Gold Dairy which still produces the stuff (they make 1.3 million gallons of the juice every month). If you’ve ever been on an inner-island flight in Hawaii, your attendant probably offered you a choice of water, soda, or POG on your flight.

It’s kind of hard to find on the mainland although I’m fortunate to live near a Hawaiian-Japanese market that carries the real stuff. A few other companies have tried to formulate their own POG versions but Hawaiians will tell you that nothing tastes quite like the Meadow Gold Dairy original version.

That said, you can try and make your own POG by blending one cup Kern’s guava nectar, one cup Welch’s passion fruit nectar, and 2/3 cup no-pulp orange juice. This version will probably be a little less sweet than real POG, which is fine with me and perfect for POG cocktails—just add a shot of rum and a squeeze of lime and hula away!