New Zealand
Kai o Aotearoa
Māori kai, British farmhouse cooking and Pacific Rim immigration on two islands with excellent lamb, dairy and seafood.
Māori settlers from East Polynesia brought the earth oven and kūmara around 1300 and adapted their cooking to a temperate country. The pig, potato, sheep and wheat flour that arrived with Europeans from the 1790s were absorbed fast; hāngī, boil-up and rēwena bread are the result. A century of farming for Britain produced roasts, pies and a national baking culture. Immigration from the Pacific Islands and Asia since the 1970s, plus a coffee and wine boom, remade the cities' restaurants.
Plain, generous and seasonal. Lamb and beef roasted or slow cooked; kūmara, potato and pumpkin as the standard vegetables; shellfish and whitebait when the season allows. Butter, golden syrup and condensed milk run through the baking: Afghans, Anzacs, lolly cake, pavlova, hokey pokey. Māori dishes favour slow steaming and boiling with bitter greens. Heat is rare, salt is honest and portions are large.
Countries and regions
North Island · South Island · West Coast · Auckland
Dishes 7
- 3 hr 30 min
Oven hāngī
Hāngī
Meat, kūmara, potato and pumpkin steamed slowly under foil in a home oven — the flavours of a hāngī without the hole in the ground.
New ZealandEasy
- 15 min
Whitebait fritters
Tiny whole fish bound with barely enough egg and fried in butter — the New Zealand spring treat eaten on white bread with lemon.
New ZealandEasy
- 1 hr 5 min
Afghan biscuits
Afghans
Dense chocolate butter biscuits with crushed cornflakes for crunch, topped with chocolate icing and a walnut half.
New ZealandEasy
- 2 hr 20 min
Lolly cake
A no-bake log of crushed malt biscuits, butter and condensed milk studded with chewy fruit puffs and rolled in coconut.
New ZealandVery easy
- 8 hr 35 min
Hokey pokey ice cream
No-churn vanilla ice cream folded with shards of homemade honeycomb toffee — New Zealand's second-favourite flavour.
New ZealandEasy
- 61 hr 30 min
Rēwena bread
Parāoa rēwena
Māori sourdough raised with a fermented potato starter — a dense, tangy, slightly sweet loaf that keeps for days.
New ZealandMedium
- 2 hr 50 min
Boil-up
Pork bones simmered with potato, kūmara and watercress, finished with soft flour doughboys — the Māori one-pot dinner.
New ZealandEasy