National Geographic Traveller (UK) - Food
ETHICALLY SOURCED, ORGANIC DINNERS, THREE NIGHTS A WEEK
My story starts with wind and fire; born in Baku, Azerbaijan, a country of precious traditions and a magnificent passion for food. The first memory that comes to mind when I think about the start of my journey is my grandma in the kitchen, experimenting with recipes using the best hand-picked ingredients from the land.
It is easy for me to see that my passion was born here – by connecting with authentic flavours from my childhood and learning about the land, I am able to serve a new type of love - the love for our planet.
working the silver skin with his knife, “but I get the job done.” Karl tells me this wild venison will almost certainly taste better than its supermarket counterpart due to the animal’s omnivorous diet, which includes the medicinal plants of the forest. The meat is a staple around here, hunted locally and cooked very simply, usually just with a little butter and onion.
Indigenous cuisine revolves around seasonal ingredients from the land, so every iwi has its own traditions, although there’s commonality: smoke, root vegetables, seafood, native plants, and preservation. The importance of the ingredients and a connection to the land is apparent in all conversations with Nadine’s family. The cuisine, centred around a principle of allowing ingredients to taste just as they are, makes sense, as does the traditional way of cooking — hāngi, where food is cooked underground with heated rocks. Just outside is a square of dirt where a hāngi is often laid down — although not today. A stack of jute sacks wait to the side, ready to be soaked in water and used to cover the food, creating steam trapped by earth. It’s a lengthy process, requiring at least three hours for the rocks to get red-hot in the fire and another three for cooking, so it’s not done daily.
Atamira, another member of Nadine’s whānau, arrives with a bottle of wine. She lives nearby, in Te Urewera, and is soon tasked with fixing the watercress salad from the large pile of leaves soaking in the sink. “Should I leave the stems on?” Ata calls out to Nadine, who replies, “Are they bitter, babe?” They are, so we snap them off by hand. Watercress is conventionally eaten in a boil-up (a bone-based stew), but Nadine tells me her cooking strives to utilise indigenous ingredients in ways her older relatives may never have experienced, bringing in a little global influence from her travels and the international visitors who stop by at Kohutapu. Muddled with avocado, red onion and feta, the salad is then drizzled with sundried tomato oil.
By now, the dough for the fried bread has been proving for half an hour, and it’s time to start dividing it up. It’s extremely sticky, so I coat my hands in flour. The dough should be handled as little as possible — to avoid knocking the air out — and cutting it is all in a flick of the wrist, slicing a straight line down and quickly freeing a small portion from the rest of the dough. We end up with scone-sized pieces, ready to cook.
Nadine and I work the deep-fry station together, turning over the golden balls as they bob in and out of shimmering oil. Fried bread was invented post-colonisation, she says, as Māori wouldn’t previously have had access to some of the ingredients, but it’s become a mainstay at marae (Māori meeting grounds),
during special occasions. The first piece, smothered in butter and golden syrup, tastes so good, I eat two more in quick succession. Bodhi holds a shushing finger to his lips as he walks past, a piece of precious, stolen fried bread gripped in his other hand.
The spirit of manaakitanga
During prep for the meal, guests from Waiheke Island (around 200 miles north west) arrive in their caravans, having begged Nadine to let them join the feast. In the spirit of manaakitanga (hospitality), a value central to Māori culture, she couldn’t say no. It’s dark outside where we’ll be eating, so there’s a soft spotlight illuminating the long table, now neatly set for 12. For a few moments, a black cat jumps up to claim a seat, tail moving back and forth as it waits for the food to arrive.
And then it does, all at once: molehills of vegetables roasted in duck fat, all tumbling over each other; bowls of fried bread with smoked salmon pate served alongside; vibrant watercress salad; crumbed venison, simply pan-fried; baked pumpkin filled with bacon soup.
Atamira leads a karakia to bless the food, and then the mood turns cheerful; there’s little formality as we reach across each other and pile our plates high. Chatter breaks up into small pockets: a conversation about local sports soon turns into a discussion on Atamira’s work with community market gardens and her interest in raising awareness about indigenous plants and medicine.
It’s easy, curious conversation.
The venison is delicious and tender, but it’s the watercress salad my fork keeps reaching for: perhaps because I saw it through from soil to plate. Nadine, apron still on, flits around, checking in on all her guests. She loads a plate, scooping up a little portion of every dish, and slides it under the nose of Josh, our photographer. “I’ve been watching what you’ve been eating,” she scolds.
Somehow, there’s still room for dessert: a slice of Nadine’s pavlova, topped with raspberries that Karl and Tylah-fern picked down the road, and forest honey from an iwi in nearby Ruatāhuna. Crunchy, chewy, silky and seriously sweet: it’s a fabulous pav.
After we whisk the empty plates back into the kitchen, Nadine insists we head to sleep; it’s been a long day. My eyes, dragging down, answer for me, and I leave with a full stomach and echoes of the whānau’s laughter in my ears.
HOW TO DO IT
Kohutapu Lodge offers self-catering doubles from NZ$100 (£52). The closest major airport is Auckland, served by Air New Zealand, Qatar Airways and more. kohutapulodge.co.nz newzealand.com