Mas huni

History

Mas huni, a mix of shredded smoked tuna, grated coconut, and lime, is the most common traditional breakfast in the Maldives, an archipelago where pole-and-line skipjack tuna fishing has been an essential food resource for centuries. Its preparation requires no cooking at all, just the assembly of ingredients that are abundantly available locally.

Eaten wrapped inside a still-warm roshi flatbread, mas huni sets the rhythm of the morning in nearly every Maldivian household, from the most remote islands to the tourist resorts of Malé.

Ingredients — serves 4

• 200 g smoked, dried tuna (rihaakuru, or canned tuna as a substitute)
• 1 fresh coconut, grated
• 2 limes
• 2 bird’s eye chilies
• 1 small red onion
• Salt

Mas huni, step by step

1. Shred the smoked, dried tuna finely by hand or with a fork.
2. Grate the fresh coconut flesh as finely as you can.
3. Mince the red onion and deseeded bird’s eye chilies very finely, to taste.
4. Combine the shredded tuna, grated coconut, onion, and chilies in a large bowl.
5. Squeeze the lime juice over the mixture and season with salt to taste.
6. Knead everything together by hand to bind it well, then serve right away with warm roshi flatbread.

Cooking method

Technique: an entirely raw preparation made by hand-mixing and kneading, with no cooking at all, to preserve the freshness of the ingredients.

Traditional equipment: the Maldivian coconut grater (hiya kureumaha), a grating stool traditionally used while seated on the floor.

Signs it’s ready: the mixture should stay slightly moist and well-bound, never dry or grainy, so it holds together inside the roshi flatbread.

A raw-fish breakfast with island cousins

Mas huni sits in a small family of Pacific and Indian Ocean dishes built the same way: cured or dried fish, citrus, and grated coconut, combined with no cooking at all — Fijian kokoda and Hawaiian poke follow a similar logic, using acid rather than heat to “cook” fresh fish. What sets mas huni apart is the fish itself: smoked, dried tuna rather than fresh raw fillets, a preservation method suited to an archipelago where refrigeration has historically been scarce and pole-and-line tuna fishing has been the dominant food source for centuries.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided across four servings. Protein is high at 36 g per serving, driven by the dried tuna’s concentrated protein content once the water is removed through smoking and drying.

Saturated fat, at 23 g per serving, comes almost entirely from the fresh grated coconut rather than the fish, which itself is lean.

Economic context

Tuna and coconut are both effectively free inputs for a Maldivian household with access to the sea and a coconut palm, which keeps mas huni’s real cost well under the archipelago’s daily healthy-diet figure above despite the country’s high overall cost of living, driven largely by imported staples other than fish and coconut.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. This figure describes the cost of a healthy diet in the Maldives generally — it is not a costing of this specific recipe.

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