Xtremely hot Maori lunch cooked in lizard cauldron (2). Video. Eat, play, love, New Zealand

October 27, 4:08 PMSF Culinary Travel ExaminerWanda Hennig

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      Lunch at Te Puia, New Zealand — green-lipped mussels and shrimp cooked in 'the lizard.'

Continued from Part 1 (with slideshow). Plus, please see Ngararatuatara video featuring Te Taru White and our Te Puia lunch, below.

Different geothermal pools at Te Puia are used for bathing, healing and cooking. “This one (Ngararatuatara) we use specifically for cooking," says Te Puia chief executive officer, Te Taru White. "It gets up to 99 degrees C (210 degrees F), so you wouldn’t want to dip your toe in that particular water, but we can cook all sorts of foods in here.”

Chef Beattie, as I say, was cooking us prawns, mussels and corn. But that is not the extent of his, or Ngararatuatara’s, steamy repertoire. “We even can cook pasta in here,” said Te Taru White. “We had the president of the Academia Barilla from Italy here. We dined him in the same way (as we’re dining you).” Except he got the pasta and “and was just fascinated by this.”

“You might regard this as the world’s very unique cooking cauldron. It’s called Ngararatuatara. The ‘tuatara’ is the native lizard of New Zealand and that refers to the color and the skin-like forms around the edge of the pool. Our people looked at it and said, ah, that looks like the tuatara, so they named in Ngararatuatara.” — Te Taru White

The oysters we ate were from north North Island. The green-lipped mussels from the top of South Island. The folks at Te Puia also harvest their own mussels from a coastal spot about an hour away. “But the mussels we harvest are a lot bigger.” The green lipped, said Te Taru White, were sweeter and smaller and “better tailored for the international taste.”

We drank Taa Kawa beer with our lunch, made from the leaf of the KawaKawa (an indigenous plant reputed to have spiritual and medicinal qualities, known to clean toxins from the body).

We had a salad of cucumber, onion and blue-lipped mussels; rewena bread “traditionally made from fermented potatoes,” said Te Taru White; and we ate moe moe (purple) potatoes. See a rewena bread recipe here.

Our Maori–style hummus was made from chick peas mixed with kumara, a sweet potato, and hiropito, a natural pepper. And there was a chutney made with spices, sugar and tamarillo, a tree tomato.

©: Story Wanda Hennig, 2009; ©: Photos Wanda Hennig; Video: Wanda Hennig — Photo of woven flax-fiber cooking bag, above right, courtesy Te Puia.

Coming soon: Part 3 of this story, with a Maori haka and hangi description on video plus more slides showing Rotorua and surrounds. See Part 1 of Xtremely hot Maori lunch here, plus a slideshow on Te Puia and some of Rotorua's boating attractions.