Northland’s international and domestic students have enjoyed a day of cooking and eating the famous New Zealand pie, as the region’s chefs hunt for our traditional food culture.

The return of the first batch of
international students post-Covid was celebrated at Northland Cooking School last month.

Study Northland project manager Jo Lees said the first in-person fun activity was enjoyed by students from Whangārei Girls High School, Springbank School, and NorthTec.

Although the organisers wanted to do the classic Kiwi meat pie, chef Brooke Irving had to go with kumara pie since many students were vegetarian.

Lees said it was interesting because there were “quite a few students from countries where food generally is a lot spicier”.

The Advocate spoke to Northland chefs to understand New Zealand’s food culture and what some of the other classics are.

Kiwi food culture is now starting to explore its own backyard and paying more attention to indigenous ingredients, along with becoming more local in its approach.

Daniel Fraser, The Lindis Group chief executive and head chef of the Sage restaurant at the Paroa Bay Winery, said the country was now experiencing and embracing its own style of cuisine.

While the food in the 50s, 60s, or even 70s was very much “British, meat-based, and three-vegetable sort of”, now experts were taking some of the old experiences and putting a modern mix on it with ingredients native to NZ, said Fraser.

“You will find a lot more native Māori herbs going on. A lot of people, myself included, like to reinvent something that has nostalgia based on the past.”

Fraser is coming up with a dessert centered around another Kiwi classic: the lamington.

“… obviously I am not going to put lamingtons on a plate, I am going to put all of those ingredients, and the idea for me is it reminds people of something in the past, but we are trying to champion NZ ingredients.”

Fraser said the country’s food culture was seeing a reinvention of the Kiwi classics.

“For example, somebody doing a modern take on sausage roll; it’s not a sausage roll, but it is the nostalgic item we had growing up, and being able to recreate them with prime NZ produce.”

The Bay of Islands chef said he liked to embrace Far North-specific produce.

About 90 per cent of the products he uses in the restaurant are NZ products, and at least 80 per cent come from within a range of 150 kilometres.

“It is about being regional-centric and trying to work with the area you are in.”

Tama Salive, head chef of the Duke Of Marlborough restaurant in Russell, says NZ food culture is on the path to adopting a more indigenous way of cooking, and is slowly tapping into the hidden Māori treasure.

“Hāngī is very native to NZ.

“We work with other hāngī masters in developing these types of brands.

“Using the hāngī as the oven, so we might smoke the butter one day and take it back into the kitchen and make, say, for example, beurre blanc, which is a very French thing. But we might have added the smoked flavour to it in the hāngī and added an NZ flavour to it.”

Salive said while the country should try to stamp NZ flavours on the food, the country was still trying to find out what those flavours were.

“Our farms and family-oriented businesses have grown to produce the best of what they do over the years, and these pockets are all across the country.

“We need to tap into them and their stories. So, then we are bringing our experience in hospitality, generations of stories and hard work laid out before [diners] and creating an experience as a whole package for the customers.”

Salive said there were many native NZ ingredients that could replace the European introduced flavours.

“For example, a replacement for pepper could be kawakawa or horopito, as they both have pepper flavour in them.

“That is how we will evolve into the branding of NZ food.

“As Kiwis, we eat a lot of fish and chips, pavlova, pies or sausage rolls and that is probably why we think it is a NZ thing to do.

“And it is not necessarily a Kiwi thing, but hāngī is.”

Meanwhile, Whangārei’s Quay restaurant head chef Sam Bomfield said it was quite difficult to name the traditional classic Kiwi food, since New Zealand food was shallow and derived from other countries and cultures.

“It (NZ food culture) does not have a massive history and we have copied a lot of places.

“I want to say fish and chips, but it’s not necessarily Kiwi.”

“Although we eat a lot of lamb roast, pies, or sausage rolls, they come from English cooking.

“However, now we do one of the best pies and are pretty onto it.”

For Bomfield, the classic food when he was growing up was going to the beach and catching a fish or crayfish fresh out of the ocean.

“Fresh seafood cooked simply is probably a prominent Kiwi food.”

Bomfield said New Zealanders loved travelling and hence a lot of the food was influenced by Kiwi chefs who go overseas and bring their food back here.

“The big factor is our food culture comes from other places.”

However, he said, the country was starting to now rely more on buying local produce and thusly giving every dish an NZ-centric taste.

“We have the old specific food like hāngī or boil-up, but we do not have a modern culture really.

“But we have now got local food and suppliers. The less you do with it, the more it shines through the natural beauty of it.

“There are many restaurants who are now doing a modern form of traditional boil-up.”