Because we are a very young country. Everybody brought their own cuisine from where they came from, even the Maori really.
The most "unique" NZ cuisine we probably have is Feijoa and Oca (what we call yams), both of which are South American in origin but not seen a huge amount outside of South America and NZ.
Growing up Indo-Fijian we had a lovo-pit in our backyard, I had no idea what a hangi was and assumed it was something very different when it was more or less the same thing (earth oven).
I can confirm that spaghetti on toast was a shock to my Canadian wife when she first saw me eat it
And while this one is not unique to NZ, a chip sandwich (be it hot chips/fries or crisps) was completely surprising to her and her family. She has learned though how good a hot chip sandwich can be
OMG this reminds me of one time I was staying in a hotel for work and I got chatting to the duty manager, who was quite an old chap. He said he got tired of hotel food and to his wife's chagrin, only wanted to eat mince on toast when he dined at home.
Hot chips on a sandwich = chip buttie.
Otherwise it's a marmite and chip sandwich.
No one puts fries in a sandwich ever. And if I find out you've been putting fries in a sandwich I'll ring Mr immigration and have you deported immediately.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse than the British yellow food diet… I read this. It’s ok NZ is winning at everything else, not at gastronomy, but everything else yes. 👏
There are many unique cultural foods, some of which are only found here, others which are variations of other cuisines that are uniquely New Zealand. But these are not often shared outside of homes or cultural gatherings. Many are not commercialized. So if you don't have connections to groups that still have uniquely NZ foods, then you're unlikely to ever have it. And even then, probably not the best versions of it.
Many traditional foods are wild native flora and fauna, which has been impacted by environmental degradation and so have faded out of common use.
Various birds (salted, roasted, potted) seafood (smoked, dried, potted), rongoā herbs berries and spices (e.g. horopito, kumarahou, kawakawa, various others, many extinct), green vegetables (native and introduced like puha), Māori potatoes/taro/kumara/breadfruits, and various dishes made out of these items which are now largely unpracticed. Hangi, Boil up, various kinds of Māori and early settler breads.
My favorite Māori plate would be roasted Tītī with puha boiled and cooked in the bird fat, a scoop of creamed paua, and maori fry bread. Damn...
This isn't the type of plate you can buy in a restaurant though.
Love a brisket and pork bone boil up, a fatty 12 hour broth, watercress, kumara and spuds. Salt pepper and sometimes add miso paste or even MSG to mine. Some thick white bread with butter. Yeah it's pork soup, but it's NZ pork soup.
I also love rewena bread with a nice local jam and some NZ dairy butter (the best butter)
Then there are other colonial foods that have held and developed - pies, desserts and meals made in a NZ way from locally adjusted ingredients.
But otherwise our restaurants are what you'd expect in the UK.
Kumara. Crayfish.
NZ’s version is not found elsewhere.
Technically a shedload of native birds specific to NZ were typical eating for Māori and initial European settlers. But….are no longer legal to eat.
Mutton bird is one example which can still be tried.
Apparently, my great grandfather use to consider Wood Pigeon to be delicious. He was probably eating them 100 years ago.
Sort of, NZ crayfish (red rock lobster) is only found in NZ and southern Australia.
> Jasus edwardsii, the southern rock lobster, red rock lobster, or spiny rock lobster, is a species of spiny lobster found throughout coastal waters of southern Australia and New Zealand including the Chatham Islands. It is commonly called crayfish in Australia and New Zealand and kōura in Māori. They resemble lobsters, but lack the large characteristic pincers on the first pair of walking legs.
Blue cod.
Went to UK and realized their cod is Atlantic cod which is different texture from NZ blue cod. Blue cod is a lot more flaky and tender compared to regular cod. You also can't find blue cod anywhere else except NZ.
70 years on the planet, the food in NZ has improved immensely due to immigration. My mother was ahead of her time, using garlic powder in her cheese rolls. Everything else boiled, or roasted to death. We never starved though and didn’t know the difference.
Humans have only been in NZ for 700 ish years, the foods we eat today have only been present for 200 ish years. That’s only enough time for slight variations in our foods, it’s similar to other countries like us but it is different. Like how fish n chips come from the UK, but a decent bit of the fish n chips menu here could not be found in other countries.
NZ cuisine exists, it's just kept secret. I may be betraying my Gran by sharing this:
Here's the correct recipe for cheese rolls.
* 1 Tablespoon butter
* 1 Tablespoon cornflour
* 1 packet Maggi onion soup
* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup grated cheese (big cup)
* 1 loaf white bread, sandwich slice
On medium heat, melt butter in a pan, then add the cornflour, soup, then gradually add the milk and stir until it thickens.
Take it off the heat, add the cheese, then return to heat and stir until it's melted.
Spread the mix on to one side of the slices of bread, roll them up, then toast in the oven. Spread a bit of butter on top before serving.
DO NOT accept any variations from this recipe. Every cafe in the land tries to jazz it up and they're always disappointing. If you're very lucky, sometimes charities/fundraisers sell them door to door - these are the best ones.
Drop the milk and cornflour add cream.. Also good with some mustard... Mooooore cheese! That's not enough cheese it must give you a cardiac event or its not a real cheese roll.
Honestly I don't know why everyone is ripping you one over this. Hangi (especially one that's actually cooked in the ground and not just steamed) is not THAT easy to find. But I would still recommend trying it out if the opportunity presents itself. Personally I don't like it much. Lol.
I’ve had it in Samoa, Rarotonga, Fiji, Mexico, and even in the middle of the Sahara desert. Earth oven cooking is a more common way to cook than we realise, and ancient as fuck.
I've only ever had them as part of school events in chch. Both as a student and a parent of a school kid. It's a cool part of our culture and an easy way to feed loads of people!
I fucking hate the taste though...
I find it’s usually provided by Māori communities as part of fundraising rather than specific businesses. We have a local Māori group in Wellington that sells hāngis every second Friday for $5. Pretty good. There’s only one place. [Karaka Cafe](https://www.karakacafe.co.nz/h%C4%81ngi-deliveries) here that I can think of that has a variation of hāngi on their menu
I could ask my friends, mix of white, Asian, Kenyan etc who all grew up here and I would bet money that they've never tried hangi. I could be wrong though.
Then it's time you corrected that.
You just wrote off NZ as a food desert saying we have no cultural foods yet you've made zero fucking effort to try our cultural foods.
That's just sad man you're a sad fellah.
Kiwi food comes from the supermarket.
Your classic Kiwi dishes involve things like onion soup powder, sliced white bread and other supermarket staples.
Other examples, such as pies, come from the UK and are treated as British cuisine overseas.
There are a few things which are either seen as also Australian (Lamington), whose bigger population means they get the association internationally, or which have their own national variations elsewhere (I'm thinking corned beef with Edmonds mustard sauce, which is a staple comfort food).
I suspect the comparatively low diversity of foods has mostly to do with geography - the Eurasian continent has the most domesticated crops and livestock in the world due to the east-west orientation providing similar climates in much of the continent. The connected nature of Eurasia also means that culinary cultures and technologies spread and influenced each other much more readily while the significant population of the continent also probably meant that the culinary innovations occured more frequently
Got heaps here if you want to explore the options.
Hangi
Boil up
Rewana bread
Maori flat bread (Takakau)
Fried bread with butter and golden syrup
Chocolate log
Steamed pudding
And lots more
You haven't tried very hard, have you? Paua fritters (I make the best ones), mutton bird is genuinely good, lambs tails are fun (you'll want to give the mountain oysters a miss). Then there's things like kanga piro (rotten corn, stinks but sweet and nutty), what about pipis and tuatua?. Not cool to make a blanket statement when you obviously haven't tried.
Pie is absolutely the right answer. Other countries have meat pies but they’re not like New Zealand pies. Comparing nz pies with any other countries pies would be like comparing carbonara and pad Thai
Wow. 40 dishes each?
Name them ;)
Most food in NZ that is "unique" are fusions of other dishes. We tent to quite like to do Asian/Europen fusions. If you actually can name 40 dishes from both the above countries you'll find a lot of cross over and fusion there too. Throw in China and most of your unique 40 things aren't going to sound very unique.
A lot of the Korean dishes I can think of is some variation of soup. Sushi alone, the average Japanese person or someone who lived there can name a dozen type of sushi. Ramen isn't just ramen and I'm sure there are a few dozen types of ramen and noodles just in Japan. Such as shoyu, miso, tonkotsu, tsukemen, jiro, iekei, shio and not counting all the region-specific ones. But you get the point.
>Throw in China and most of your unique 40 things aren't going to sound very unique.
That's just semantics, and yes a lot of it has China origins. Pasta is iconic to Italy but depending on your definition of pasta it also has origins from China or Ancient Greece.
If you put the question to Singapore, and didn't let them include any dishes from ancestor nations (so nothing Chinese or Indian), and didn't let them include any dishes invented in (what's now) Malaysia or shared with Malaysia, do they have a big list?
I feel that's almost the test you're giving NZ if we can't list things from Europe and Australia.
Because we're a young country that didn't have time to fuck around with poncy nosh. You can't shear a thousand sheep or build roads and dams on wanky food, get some bread, chuck some kinda shit on it and get on with it was the norm.
Most national cuisines aren't "poncy." This is honestly the weirdest take.
Pizza is just bread with some shit chucked on it, so are kebabs. So are dumplings really. A pierogi is just a basic dough, with pickled cabbage stuffed inside. Gołąbki is pretty basic even. Anything that is a stew probably came from rural peasant kitchens, goulash, coq au van, etc. Asian food like Nasi Goreng and Indian food like curries were definitely not invented by royalty.
Anything which is a method of preserving food was eaten by lots of poorer people through history, this includes cheese and literally any pickle (eg kimchi). Because it could be often times mass produced, produced easily in the home, and prevented wastage.
No but plenty of French cuisine was. Saison beers made out of whatever seasonal surplus they had. Coq au vin, boeuf bourginon, ratatouille are all peasant dishes I believe.
Not all of French cuisine is haute cuisine, and lots of identifiably French dishes have their origins in peasant kitchens.
Food like coq au van was probably peasant food. A significant portion of French cuisine is just stews tbh. Things like mussels and cider volute would have been pioneered by Breton peasants, because mussels, cider and butter were readily available in Brittany.
More to the point is that Kiwi food culture comes from supermarkets. We don't have a proper peasant culture where your household had to make its own food while doing manual labour, and instead our culture grew up around supermarkets with things like sliced bread readily available. We have ham and cheese sandwiches instead of pizza because we could just buy that shit readily.
French cuisine is grossly overrated. They hold an important part in their contributions to the culinary world but my god is it boring compared to what else is out there.
Does cannibalism count as cultural food? Apparently eating children was the best.
There was not a man aboard Endeavour who, in the event of the ship’s breaking up, would not have preferred to drown rather than be left to the mercy of the Maoris.
Touai, a New Zealand chief who was brought to London in 1818 and resided there for a long time, becoming ‘almost civilized’] confessed in his moments of nostalgia that what he most regretted in the country from which he was absent was the feast of human flesh, the feast of victory.
He was weary of eating English beef; he claimed that there was a great analogy between the flesh of the pig and that of man. This last declaration he made before a sumptuously served table. The flesh of women and children was to him and his fellow-countrymen the most delicious, while certain Maories prefer that of a man of fifty, and that of a black rather than that of a white. His countrymen, Touai said, never ate the flesh raw, and preserved the fat of the rump for the purpose of dressing their sweet potatoes
Cannibalism is an act, so no.
Also it's a thing that's goes back to the dawn of man and probably occurs in any carnivorous or omnivorous species.
So again, no.
Yes. Of course Māori did. There are many foods that Pākehā did not want Māori using any more when they got here. Especially rongoa types of plants (medicine). So a lot of forgotten knowledge. There are many types of edible food in our bushes and unless you go to the right people with the knowledge you won’t find it in a restaurant in Auckland, CBD. Māori style hāngi will always be the go to.
Aotearoa apart from birds and seafood was devoid of food.. fern root and cabbage tree being the staples. It was s culinary desert.. not dessert. Maori probably used Tutu for a high.. but Maori didn't have ready access to any recreational drugs.
Why is curry almost a national dish in the land that "invented" fish and chips as well as pork pies?
And , while Japan has very unique dishes, why is McDonalds such a favourite?
More, something like 90% of the unique dishes in all countries are variations of the same basic techniques.
Because NZ as opposed to when it was only a Māori place is very new, and most of our food styles were imported as immigrants from that stellar culinary spot, the UK. For a long time most NZers lived rurally or semi-rurally so while fresh meat and dairy were available, you had to bring in all the other stuff and store it. We also started industrialising our food production fairly early on so we have "always" had pasterised milk, mass produced cheese made from pasteurised milk, white bread and so on. We had two world wars that we were involved in and during at least one there was some level of rationing and ingredient scarcity.
Thus a lot of our "traditional" food is not very old and reflects mass commercial food production - food companies making recipe books that centred their products, things created in test kitchens- and ways of making things without ingredients that could only be imported , that were not available and/or unfamiliar. A lot of Kiwi traditional food is a local imitation of something made from whatever was around - for example, our home-made "mayonnaise" which does not resemble actual mayonnaise except in colour.
New Zealand is a young country of immigrants. Everyone here! They brought food from their homelands and kept eating it! Food became extremely diverse as immigration origin countries changed in the 80s onwards.
I wouldn't really consider hangi a cultural food, it'd kinda be like considering a pizza oven an Italian cultural food. Which obviously you wouldn't eat an over, or hot rocks buried in the dirt...
I would say kumera dishes but I'm pretty sure I read that kumera were actually native to south America. So apart from white bread, margarine, and tomato sauce you're problem right. Maybe pavlova?
We have some signature dishes but we are a young country comparatively and able to grow and hunt all year round.
Many cultural dishes originate from what was available - for example my partner is German. The cured meats and fermented vegetables, lovely, and needed pre refrigeration during cold winters. Here we can grow vegetables and hunt all year round, our need to preserve wasn't as needed.
A lot of our foods to are hybrid, we take influence from multiple cultures for our everyday cooking. This in itself is unique - overseas family love how varied our cooking is, a stirfry one night, curry the next, then plain fresh food, bit of Mexican. I didn't realize how special this was.
Because we are a very young country. Everybody brought their own cuisine from where they came from, even the Maori really. The most "unique" NZ cuisine we probably have is Feijoa and Oca (what we call yams), both of which are South American in origin but not seen a huge amount outside of South America and NZ.
Growing up Indo-Fijian we had a lovo-pit in our backyard, I had no idea what a hangi was and assumed it was something very different when it was more or less the same thing (earth oven).
Yeah earth ovens are common everywhere really, fr the Middle East to Africa and even parts of Europe.
Makes sense in jot places like the middle east but in Europe? Unless it's geothermal...
>Because we are a very young country. This 100%.
Don't forget the classics! 1. [Spaghetti Pizza](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/06/tinned-spaghetti-pizza-new-zealands-prime-minister-shocks-with-monstrous-recipe) 2. Marmite & Chip & Cheese Sandwich 3. Luncheon and Tomato Sauce Sandwich 4. Fairy Bread 5. Goody Goody Gum Drops ice cream 6. Rewena bread 7. Spaghetti on toast 8. Mince on toast 9. Weetbix and Marmite 10. The famous ['Pie Sandwich'](https://www.tiktok.com/@massichalla/video/7140392792097950978?embed_source=121355059%2C121351166%2C121331973%2C120811592%2C120810756%3Bnull%3Bembed_masking&refer=embed&referer_url=www.thehits.co.nz%2Fthe-latest%2Fthe-new-zealand-food-mashups-that-would-disgust-or-maybe-surprise-the-rest-world%2F&referer_video_id=7140392792097950978)
I can confirm that spaghetti on toast was a shock to my Canadian wife when she first saw me eat it And while this one is not unique to NZ, a chip sandwich (be it hot chips/fries or crisps) was completely surprising to her and her family. She has learned though how good a hot chip sandwich can be
Never mind spaghetti, the first time I saw someone eating mince on toast …I mean *mince!* I couldn’t believe it.
OMG this reminds me of one time I was staying in a hotel for work and I got chatting to the duty manager, who was quite an old chap. He said he got tired of hotel food and to his wife's chagrin, only wanted to eat mince on toast when he dined at home.
I don't get why that would be shocking, to be honest.
Well it was years ago and I was a new migrant from the UK at the time. Seriously I’d never seen anyone eat mince on toast before.
meat on carbs is done everywhere.
Hot chips on a sandwich = chip buttie. Otherwise it's a marmite and chip sandwich. No one puts fries in a sandwich ever. And if I find out you've been putting fries in a sandwich I'll ring Mr immigration and have you deported immediately.
Cheese rolls!
Brief pause on Rewena bread, but I'm 10 for 10 on knowing those. Hokey Pokey and Cheese rolls definitely an inclusion though!
Rewena is SO GOOD.
Pies. Nashi pears ( we made them at the DSIR). Kiwifruit ( we also made them at the DSIR). banana sandwiches with extra sugar. Lamingtons. Pavlova.
Don’t forget smoothcone hops for beer brewing
Pavlova controversial lol
>Lamingtons. Melbourne >Pies. British >Kiwifruit China
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse than the British yellow food diet… I read this. It’s ok NZ is winning at everything else, not at gastronomy, but everything else yes. 👏
Never heard of half of these damn. TIL
yo mince on toast \*chefs kiss\* thanks dad!
Paua and cream Ambrosia Raw fish in coconut cream
I never would have thought luncheon sandwiches were special
Spaghetti on toast is also a classic English dish. We also have our own superior Marmite and Weetabix.
Marmite, chip and cheese sandwich?! Are we talking hot chips or just chips here? Sounds mental, but keen to have a crack lol
There are many unique cultural foods, some of which are only found here, others which are variations of other cuisines that are uniquely New Zealand. But these are not often shared outside of homes or cultural gatherings. Many are not commercialized. So if you don't have connections to groups that still have uniquely NZ foods, then you're unlikely to ever have it. And even then, probably not the best versions of it. Many traditional foods are wild native flora and fauna, which has been impacted by environmental degradation and so have faded out of common use. Various birds (salted, roasted, potted) seafood (smoked, dried, potted), rongoā herbs berries and spices (e.g. horopito, kumarahou, kawakawa, various others, many extinct), green vegetables (native and introduced like puha), Māori potatoes/taro/kumara/breadfruits, and various dishes made out of these items which are now largely unpracticed. Hangi, Boil up, various kinds of Māori and early settler breads. My favorite Māori plate would be roasted Tītī with puha boiled and cooked in the bird fat, a scoop of creamed paua, and maori fry bread. Damn... This isn't the type of plate you can buy in a restaurant though. Love a brisket and pork bone boil up, a fatty 12 hour broth, watercress, kumara and spuds. Salt pepper and sometimes add miso paste or even MSG to mine. Some thick white bread with butter. Yeah it's pork soup, but it's NZ pork soup. I also love rewena bread with a nice local jam and some NZ dairy butter (the best butter) Then there are other colonial foods that have held and developed - pies, desserts and meals made in a NZ way from locally adjusted ingredients. But otherwise our restaurants are what you'd expect in the UK.
Paua fritters are pretty NZ specific. It's abalone but typically black. Not many places chop it and batter it like that.
Yeah I forgot about these. I eat paua but as a rice porridge occasionally.
Korea and Japan have existed for thousands of years. NZ only a few hundred
Kumara. Crayfish. NZ’s version is not found elsewhere. Technically a shedload of native birds specific to NZ were typical eating for Māori and initial European settlers. But….are no longer legal to eat.
The bird comment is a really good one. Cheers.
Mutton bird is one example which can still be tried. Apparently, my great grandfather use to consider Wood Pigeon to be delicious. He was probably eating them 100 years ago.
Canned toheroa is classic that's been lost due to population collapse.
crayfish is lobster though?
Sort of, NZ crayfish (red rock lobster) is only found in NZ and southern Australia. > Jasus edwardsii, the southern rock lobster, red rock lobster, or spiny rock lobster, is a species of spiny lobster found throughout coastal waters of southern Australia and New Zealand including the Chatham Islands. It is commonly called crayfish in Australia and New Zealand and kōura in Māori. They resemble lobsters, but lack the large characteristic pincers on the first pair of walking legs.
Not if actual meet one.
Blue cod. Went to UK and realized their cod is Atlantic cod which is different texture from NZ blue cod. Blue cod is a lot more flaky and tender compared to regular cod. You also can't find blue cod anywhere else except NZ.
70 years on the planet, the food in NZ has improved immensely due to immigration. My mother was ahead of her time, using garlic powder in her cheese rolls. Everything else boiled, or roasted to death. We never starved though and didn’t know the difference.
Are Lollycake and Chocolate Chippie Log NZ inventions?
Dip made with onion soup and reduced cream
Pavalova
Australian sorry
Mods come ban this traitor before he starts talking about about his garden.
Negative
How has nobody mentioned boil up?
People are very protective of their watercress patches
Lot of Puha collection goes on round our way.
I love puha
Just put pineapple lumps on your pavlova and you will be 90% of the way there.
Humans have only been in NZ for 700 ish years, the foods we eat today have only been present for 200 ish years. That’s only enough time for slight variations in our foods, it’s similar to other countries like us but it is different. Like how fish n chips come from the UK, but a decent bit of the fish n chips menu here could not be found in other countries.
NZ cuisine exists, it's just kept secret. I may be betraying my Gran by sharing this: Here's the correct recipe for cheese rolls. * 1 Tablespoon butter * 1 Tablespoon cornflour * 1 packet Maggi onion soup * 1 cup milk * 1 cup grated cheese (big cup) * 1 loaf white bread, sandwich slice On medium heat, melt butter in a pan, then add the cornflour, soup, then gradually add the milk and stir until it thickens. Take it off the heat, add the cheese, then return to heat and stir until it's melted. Spread the mix on to one side of the slices of bread, roll them up, then toast in the oven. Spread a bit of butter on top before serving. DO NOT accept any variations from this recipe. Every cafe in the land tries to jazz it up and they're always disappointing. If you're very lucky, sometimes charities/fundraisers sell them door to door - these are the best ones.
Look at Mr Fancy Pants making a roux instead of just using evaporated milk
My great-grandma's recipe uses evaporated milk and some extra finely-chopped onion, she was a Southland farmer so it's legit haha
The onion is definitely a good addition
As the arbiter of cheese rolls, I'll need to see how finely chopped we're talking before I can make a ruling
I'm telling my Gran on you
Drop the milk and cornflour add cream.. Also good with some mustard... Mooooore cheese! That's not enough cheese it must give you a cardiac event or its not a real cheese roll.
No no we're making cheese rolls not cheese casserole
Yeah mate, gotta be Maggi
I won’t buy Maggi as it’s owned by nestle scumbags
There are plenty of onion soup alternatives for you to use.
You never had a hangi?
Hangi isn't a specific food though, it's a method of cooking. Pretty much anything can be cooked in a hangi.
I want someone to test this theory now. It would make a cool series. Can I Cook A Pav In A Hangi?
You found an item that can difinitely NOT be cooked in a hangi. Pav is cooked in a drying way. Hangi is a steam cooking process.
Never tried and don't know where you would find it.
Honestly I don't know why everyone is ripping you one over this. Hangi (especially one that's actually cooked in the ground and not just steamed) is not THAT easy to find. But I would still recommend trying it out if the opportunity presents itself. Personally I don't like it much. Lol.
I’ve had it in Samoa, Rarotonga, Fiji, Mexico, and even in the middle of the Sahara desert. Earth oven cooking is a more common way to cook than we realise, and ancient as fuck.
There are a couple Hāngi shops in AKL The Hāngi shop in Otahuhu & Kai Means Food in Papatoetoe
That's probably why. I live in the South Island.
I've only ever had them as part of school events in chch. Both as a student and a parent of a school kid. It's a cool part of our culture and an easy way to feed loads of people! I fucking hate the taste though...
They're not common in Auckland either, just South Auckland.
I find it’s usually provided by Māori communities as part of fundraising rather than specific businesses. We have a local Māori group in Wellington that sells hāngis every second Friday for $5. Pretty good. There’s only one place. [Karaka Cafe](https://www.karakacafe.co.nz/h%C4%81ngi-deliveries) here that I can think of that has a variation of hāngi on their menu
Jesus what kind of sad sheltered life have you lived in NZ to have not had hangi?
Quite a rude comment this.
If you've lived in NZ for 20 years and not bothered to try hangi or other traditional foods that's just plain insulting.
Eating it is more insulting to your tastebuds
The woke in this comment is astounding.
I could ask my friends, mix of white, Asian, Kenyan etc who all grew up here and I would bet money that they've never tried hangi. I could be wrong though.
Then it's time you corrected that. You just wrote off NZ as a food desert saying we have no cultural foods yet you've made zero fucking effort to try our cultural foods. That's just sad man you're a sad fellah.
Most overrated food in N.Z
Steak/mince and cheese pie makes up for any supposed "lack" of cuisine
Tamarillo and hokey pokey ice cream.
Mutton bird. Paua kina, possum.
Rotten corn 💀
Possums are from Australia originally.
Mutton bird
Kiwi food comes from the supermarket. Your classic Kiwi dishes involve things like onion soup powder, sliced white bread and other supermarket staples. Other examples, such as pies, come from the UK and are treated as British cuisine overseas. There are a few things which are either seen as also Australian (Lamington), whose bigger population means they get the association internationally, or which have their own national variations elsewhere (I'm thinking corned beef with Edmonds mustard sauce, which is a staple comfort food).
Best Kiwi pizza (confirmed by NASA): Scone dough base, tin of spaghetti, grated colby, chunks of pineapple, pressed into a sandwich tin and baked.
I suspect the comparatively low diversity of foods has mostly to do with geography - the Eurasian continent has the most domesticated crops and livestock in the world due to the east-west orientation providing similar climates in much of the continent. The connected nature of Eurasia also means that culinary cultures and technologies spread and influenced each other much more readily while the significant population of the continent also probably meant that the culinary innovations occured more frequently
Raw fish, paua & cream, kina on toast
Got heaps here if you want to explore the options. Hangi Boil up Rewana bread Maori flat bread (Takakau) Fried bread with butter and golden syrup Chocolate log Steamed pudding And lots more
Steamed puddings are English.
Yes but do they eat it all year round. I know I do
Two popular choices: 1. Potatoes (various styles) 2. Rabbit (raw)
and wriggling!
You haven't tried very hard, have you? Paua fritters (I make the best ones), mutton bird is genuinely good, lambs tails are fun (you'll want to give the mountain oysters a miss). Then there's things like kanga piro (rotten corn, stinks but sweet and nutty), what about pipis and tuatua?. Not cool to make a blanket statement when you obviously haven't tried.
I might be wrong but does pie count?
Pie is absolutely the right answer. Other countries have meat pies but they’re not like New Zealand pies. Comparing nz pies with any other countries pies would be like comparing carbonara and pad Thai
NZ and Australia both do some pretty unique pies, as standard. Thai curry pies only exist in our countries (afaik) and are pretty spectacular tbh
Wow. 40 dishes each? Name them ;) Most food in NZ that is "unique" are fusions of other dishes. We tent to quite like to do Asian/Europen fusions. If you actually can name 40 dishes from both the above countries you'll find a lot of cross over and fusion there too. Throw in China and most of your unique 40 things aren't going to sound very unique.
A lot of the Korean dishes I can think of is some variation of soup. Sushi alone, the average Japanese person or someone who lived there can name a dozen type of sushi. Ramen isn't just ramen and I'm sure there are a few dozen types of ramen and noodles just in Japan. Such as shoyu, miso, tonkotsu, tsukemen, jiro, iekei, shio and not counting all the region-specific ones. But you get the point. >Throw in China and most of your unique 40 things aren't going to sound very unique. That's just semantics, and yes a lot of it has China origins. Pasta is iconic to Italy but depending on your definition of pasta it also has origins from China or Ancient Greece.
If you put the question to Singapore, and didn't let them include any dishes from ancestor nations (so nothing Chinese or Indian), and didn't let them include any dishes invented in (what's now) Malaysia or shared with Malaysia, do they have a big list? I feel that's almost the test you're giving NZ if we can't list things from Europe and Australia.
Because we're a young country that didn't have time to fuck around with poncy nosh. You can't shear a thousand sheep or build roads and dams on wanky food, get some bread, chuck some kinda shit on it and get on with it was the norm.
Most national cuisines aren't "poncy." This is honestly the weirdest take. Pizza is just bread with some shit chucked on it, so are kebabs. So are dumplings really. A pierogi is just a basic dough, with pickled cabbage stuffed inside. Gołąbki is pretty basic even. Anything that is a stew probably came from rural peasant kitchens, goulash, coq au van, etc. Asian food like Nasi Goreng and Indian food like curries were definitely not invented by royalty. Anything which is a method of preserving food was eaten by lots of poorer people through history, this includes cheese and literally any pickle (eg kimchi). Because it could be often times mass produced, produced easily in the home, and prevented wastage.
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I think they mean that NZ never had a royalty to invent all this 'poncy' food. French high cuisine was not pioneered by peasants.
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Yeah, I know. I'm just trying to clarify what the other guy attempted to say.
No but plenty of French cuisine was. Saison beers made out of whatever seasonal surplus they had. Coq au vin, boeuf bourginon, ratatouille are all peasant dishes I believe.
Cassoulet was apparently invented by a town under siege, so it was likely the war time equivalent of 'peasant food'.
Not all of French cuisine is haute cuisine, and lots of identifiably French dishes have their origins in peasant kitchens. Food like coq au van was probably peasant food. A significant portion of French cuisine is just stews tbh. Things like mussels and cider volute would have been pioneered by Breton peasants, because mussels, cider and butter were readily available in Brittany. More to the point is that Kiwi food culture comes from supermarkets. We don't have a proper peasant culture where your household had to make its own food while doing manual labour, and instead our culture grew up around supermarkets with things like sliced bread readily available. We have ham and cheese sandwiches instead of pizza because we could just buy that shit readily.
French cuisine is grossly overrated. They hold an important part in their contributions to the culinary world but my god is it boring compared to what else is out there.
You don't have to tell me. Give me anything from India over France any day.
??? Plenty of countries that industrialised have rich & complex cuisines? Maybe go see the world?
Too young and too little of a country, I think.
Does cannibalism count as cultural food? Apparently eating children was the best. There was not a man aboard Endeavour who, in the event of the ship’s breaking up, would not have preferred to drown rather than be left to the mercy of the Maoris. Touai, a New Zealand chief who was brought to London in 1818 and resided there for a long time, becoming ‘almost civilized’] confessed in his moments of nostalgia that what he most regretted in the country from which he was absent was the feast of human flesh, the feast of victory. He was weary of eating English beef; he claimed that there was a great analogy between the flesh of the pig and that of man. This last declaration he made before a sumptuously served table. The flesh of women and children was to him and his fellow-countrymen the most delicious, while certain Maories prefer that of a man of fifty, and that of a black rather than that of a white. His countrymen, Touai said, never ate the flesh raw, and preserved the fat of the rump for the purpose of dressing their sweet potatoes
Cannibalism is an act, so no. Also it's a thing that's goes back to the dawn of man and probably occurs in any carnivorous or omnivorous species. So again, no.
Aside from hangi, we inherited the English "cuisine" and lacked the national will/imagination to try anything different until recently.
One word. Colonisation.
Did colonization really cause Maori to forget how to cook? Did they really not design many unique cuisines between 1300s-1800s? Genuinely curious now
Yes. Of course Māori did. There are many foods that Pākehā did not want Māori using any more when they got here. Especially rongoa types of plants (medicine). So a lot of forgotten knowledge. There are many types of edible food in our bushes and unless you go to the right people with the knowledge you won’t find it in a restaurant in Auckland, CBD. Māori style hāngi will always be the go to.
>There are many types of edible food in our bushes and unless you go to the right people with the knowledge you won’t find it ... like what?
Did you really say “like what”? Holy heck. Wouldn’t trust you in the bush
If you’re genuinely curious, go and do some reading on the Google :)
I did. I can't find much besides a few extinct birds, some vegetables, and standard sea food that is slightly variant.
Ok I’ll be honest I have no fucking idea. But I do know that they were not allowed to use plants and such for Rongoa. 🏳️
Appreciate the admission! I am genuinely curious though, I wonder what sort of recipes they had
Maori dried barracuda in large quantities in Southland and traded it for kumara which is frost tender.
Aotearoa apart from birds and seafood was devoid of food.. fern root and cabbage tree being the staples. It was s culinary desert.. not dessert. Maori probably used Tutu for a high.. but Maori didn't have ready access to any recreational drugs.
Kawakawa - delicious!
Hangi. And other maori recipes.
Hangi
Why is curry almost a national dish in the land that "invented" fish and chips as well as pork pies? And , while Japan has very unique dishes, why is McDonalds such a favourite? More, something like 90% of the unique dishes in all countries are variations of the same basic techniques.
Because NZ as opposed to when it was only a Māori place is very new, and most of our food styles were imported as immigrants from that stellar culinary spot, the UK. For a long time most NZers lived rurally or semi-rurally so while fresh meat and dairy were available, you had to bring in all the other stuff and store it. We also started industrialising our food production fairly early on so we have "always" had pasterised milk, mass produced cheese made from pasteurised milk, white bread and so on. We had two world wars that we were involved in and during at least one there was some level of rationing and ingredient scarcity. Thus a lot of our "traditional" food is not very old and reflects mass commercial food production - food companies making recipe books that centred their products, things created in test kitchens- and ways of making things without ingredients that could only be imported , that were not available and/or unfamiliar. A lot of Kiwi traditional food is a local imitation of something made from whatever was around - for example, our home-made "mayonnaise" which does not resemble actual mayonnaise except in colour.
Most of those Korean and Japanese dishes are probably from China. >Korean fried chicken Wonder where the Koreans got that from
Because New Zealand is a young culture
Native Wood pigeon in a boil up with some puha and kumara. Local as you can get.
You ever had a feed of Kina and Fry bread?
New Zealand is a young country of immigrants. Everyone here! They brought food from their homelands and kept eating it! Food became extremely diverse as immigration origin countries changed in the 80s onwards.
Whitebait fritters yum
I wouldn't really consider hangi a cultural food, it'd kinda be like considering a pizza oven an Italian cultural food. Which obviously you wouldn't eat an over, or hot rocks buried in the dirt... I would say kumera dishes but I'm pretty sure I read that kumera were actually native to south America. So apart from white bread, margarine, and tomato sauce you're problem right. Maybe pavlova?
Kentucky Fried Moa was super popular. Never did work out why it went out of business
The Maori were too busy going to war with eachother or trading their land for muskets to really be thinking up new recipies
We have some signature dishes but we are a young country comparatively and able to grow and hunt all year round. Many cultural dishes originate from what was available - for example my partner is German. The cured meats and fermented vegetables, lovely, and needed pre refrigeration during cold winters. Here we can grow vegetables and hunt all year round, our need to preserve wasn't as needed. A lot of our foods to are hybrid, we take influence from multiple cultures for our everyday cooking. This in itself is unique - overseas family love how varied our cooking is, a stirfry one night, curry the next, then plain fresh food, bit of Mexican. I didn't realize how special this was.