Good Food Guides
Gathering for our last meal together in the whare kai, nothing managed to savage my tastebuds more than the errant tendrils of the cooked hangi smells now wafting from the kitchen into the small dining room. It had been 17 years since I last ate hangi on home soil and now the minutes couldn’t pass by soon enough for me.
“A hangi is the Māori method of cooking food using heated stones buried in the ground and that create a pit oven. The food is steam cooked under pressure from the leaves and soil. Prior to colonisation and the introduction of metals and wire, food was laid out on clean sticks, bark, large leaves and other vegetation to minimise direct contact with the hot rocks and reduce burning. Carved bowls and flat rocks were also used for this purpose.
Leaves, sticks and vegetation were used to cover the food and to prevent crushing from the weight of the earth on top. These days, there are many different hangi methods used though wire baskets became widely used in the early 19th century with hessian sacking and used white cotton sheets replacing leaves and bark.
More recently, gas heated stainless steel “hangi machines” have attempted to replicate the style of cooking without the need for a wood fire, rocks and a pit.” I would have to say that I don’t find this style of cooking hangi to be as flavoursome as in earlier times. The secret seems to be that the fat and juices from the meat dripped onto the hot rocks and burnt up causing smoke which appears to be the key to the hangi appearance, aroma and flavour of old (or certainly of my childhood).
“There are three main components to the cooking process, all of which can be affected by such variables as earth type (acording to my Dad, only in so much as they never dug in soils that were either clay or wet), the amount of heat in the rocks, quantity, type of food and placement.
They say that “hangi experts have developed and improved methods that often, like the stones themselves have been handed down for generations.” (I prefer to say that the modern hangi-makers have effected a speedier process of getting the food to the table) because I don’t know how a person gets to be an ‘expert hangi maker’ but I do know that growing up my father and my uncles made great flavoursome hangis and by that inference alone made them ‘experts’ in my opinion. The kicker is the taste. Ask the old people, they’ll tell you, it’s ALL in the taste!
Some of my fondest memories as a child growing up on a farm were those of seeing my father Wetini and my uncles Matt and Andy, hands cupped over their wooden shovel ends laughing and talking as they prepared the hangi pit. I recall alot of laughing went into their making our hangis. Perhaps that’s the reason that they tasted so good, seriously! There’s an old saying, “Ma te tika o muri, ka tika a mua, it is only through the efforts of those who work out the back, will the front flourish”
My father’s recipe for a great hangi was fairly straight forward compared to the high tech doings of todays hangi-makers. He maintains the absolute importance of using very (very) dry manuka (tea tree) or bluegum wood. Then they would dig the hole which needed to be wide enough to house the steel baskets that they used to put the food in coupled with the equally critical element of the hole’s depth.
Clean steel baskets were lined with water soaked hessian sacking and into these were also placed the various muslin bags of vegetables including potato, kumara (sweet potato) and pumpkin being the main ones. Once the hole had been dug, the fire was set up inside it using wood that was longer in length and width than the actual hole. The hangi stones were placed on top of the wood and left to heat.
My father’s hangi stones came from the lining of an old kiln that was originally used to bake the enamel on to the old wrought iron bath tubs. He believes the kiln came from Australia (a great irony to me!) so he only had to see the stones become red and he knew they were ready to use. At this stage the stones were taken from the pit and placed on some old roofing iron until the entire inside of the pit was cleared out of all ash and embers.
Some people make the fire and dig the pit later or two pits are used, one to heat the stones in and another to eventually put the stones and lay the hangi in. My Dad didn’t use a separate pit because he maintained that a second pit would not be hot enough and there would have been a considerable loss of heat from the stones in order for them to reheat a new pit.
They fine mist sprayed the inside of the hangi pit to settle the ash and dirt then re-placed the stones back into it. Willow was sometimes placed around the outside of the pit in a retainer-wall like fashion to keep the outer edges of the hangi pit dirt from crumbling inward and onto the food. Oftentimes they put watercress or cabbage leaves on top of the stones and then placed the food baskets on top of these to keep them from burning.
Large meats like pork were positioned closer to the stones because of the density of the meat while white meats such as chickens were put in the middle, vegetables near the top and the ubiquitous steam pudding maintained it’s stranglehold in the top corner of any hangi worth its salt.
The white linen sheet cloth went over the top of the metal baskets on top of the ground followed by the pre-soaked hessian sacking placed on top. This was all covered with dirt and we children, at times, were given the serious task of spotting any escaping steam. Regular checks after the ‘putting down of the hangi’ were made during the cooking process to ensure no steam did escape. The hangi was left in the ground for a minimum of 2.5 – 3 hours.
My Dad told me my Grandad used to have his hangis in the ground overnight, Grandad Pirini called it ‘slow cooking’. He also said he didn’t know how hot Grandad’s stones were but he always made a really beautiful hangi. So, as we sat eating and talking together, my cousin a great grandson of my great grandmother Moewaka Jane Rapana and me, I immensely enjoyed the fact that all my life I’ve had good food guides and never once been near a cooking school!
*This blog entry is dedicated to my Dad, Te Wetini Pirini (the younger) who took the time to tell me the order of how he made a hangi although I could probably have remembered by heart, I watched him so often when I was growing up. Watching him make hangis was one of the few times I ever wished I was a boy.
