Traditional Feast · Hāngī

Hāngī

Photo: Einalem / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

A hāngī pit can slow-cook a feast for a hundred people using nothing but fire-heated rocks buried in the ground, no electricity or gas involved.

Hāngī is the traditional Māori method of cooking in an earth oven: stones heated in a pit fire have baskets of meat, kūmara, potato and vegetables lowered onto them, then the whole pit is covered with wet cloth and soil to steam for several hours.

Why it's made this way: Without metal pots before European contact, Māori used pit-steaming with heated stones as the practical way to cook large quantities of food evenly and feed big gatherings at once.