Matariki whetū heri kai

On abundance, kai Māori and potlucks.

Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter. Mānawatia a Matariki!

Josh’s creamed pāua with urenika. Image courtesy Josh Hunter.

2024 will be the third year Aotearoa has celebrated Matariki with a public holiday. Over the last two years, I’ve been lucky enough to not only learn about Matariki as part of my mahi, but to participate in building new traditions within my workplaces – traditions that, to my pleasure, revolved mostly around kai: a plate of pickled mussels, puha, pasta salad and frybread on a picnic table outside the staffroom; a hot mug of seafood chowder with a heavy slice of pillowy taro that probably would have tasted even better if we hadn’t had to cancel our scheduled hautapu due to rain.

This year, kai is foregrounded more than ever in our national Matariki celebrations as the theme for 2024 is Matariki Heri Kai — The Feast of Matariki, taken from the whakataukī ‘Matariki whetū heri kai’ meaning ‘Matariki, the bringer of food’. It’s a proverb that speaks to Matariki as a harvest festival; the association between Matariki rising in the wintry morning sky and the success or failure of the kai harvest, but also the stars in the Matariki cluster that are associated with the various domains from which we source our kai, in particular: gardens (Tupuānuku), forests (Tupuārangi), fresh water (Waitī) and ocean (Waitā).

Chef Josh Hunter of Food by Fire and Whakapapa of your Kai.

Keen to start my own Matariki traditions outside of the workplace, I had a chat with Josh Hunter (Ngati Tūwharetoa), founder and chef for pop up series Whakapapa of your Kai as well as chef with next-level Ōtautahi-based caterers Base Food by Fire who will be cooking a hākari for 100 people tonight, the cornerstone event of Feast Matariki, a festival organised by Eat New Zealand and Ngāi Tahu.

When I call, Josh is with his mates Finbar MacCarthy and Matty Johns – a trio of legendary Canterbury chefs, just hanging out, drinking coffee and writing the menu for their next big event: a five-course feast at Stonehenge Aotearoa as part of Welly on a Plate. But before that, Josh has to cook a hākari, and beautiful produce has already started to arrive from across the Canterbury region and beyond.

“We’re breaking down a whole hog from Poaka, we’re dry-aging butterfish from Ocean Speared, we’ve got paua coming from Tora… the theme for the feast is Imagining Abundance, what it was like back in the day, so it starts with a pre-European menu.” My mouth is watering as Josh describes the menu: raw butterfish on a karengo crisp, kūmara parfait and urenika, classic creamed pāua with parāoa rēwena, butterflied fish with pickled mussels and clams swimming in a sauce made from the fish heads… and then it moves into post-European-contact times, when pigs arrived in Aotearoa along with various grain and vegetable crops. There’ll be a whole hog roasted for 12 hours, cabbages tucked in to roast with them so “that earthy, pig flavour permeates them” and then finally, the marae staple, that humble icon of local cuisine, steamed pudding, served with foraged black doris plum and a charcoal custard. Talk about imagining abundance! (Sidenote: I’m completely besotted by the idea of this custard – Josh tells me it’s super easy, you put charcoal in the cream to infuse just like you would a vanilla pod – “it tastes like burnt marshmallow.”)

When I ask about the inspiration behind his kai, especially the work he has done alongside Mitchell Teirney for Whakapapa of your Kai, Josh explains that he’s interested in the kind of kai Māori used to eat day to day, back in the day. “We don’t really do hāngī – it’s a lot of mahi and Māori weren’t cooking like that every day. Researching that kind of kai, you’ve got to read between the lines. It’s a lot of foraging, berries, funghi, protein, preserving and cooking over fire.”

But let’s say you don’t have the time or resources to research, to forage, to dig a hāngī pit, pickle fresh kaimoana or cook over fire. Let’s say you’re not much of a chef, or it’s a freezing cold Friday and thank god it’s a public holiday because you're dead tired, recovering from winter ills. When I ask Josh if he has any ideas for how people can start their own Matariki traditions at home, his answer is simple. “Best way to do it is to text or Insta or Facebook ten of your mates and have a potluck. Matariki is about catching up with loved ones, so bring something you like, everyone brings something and you have a kai together. It doesn’t have to be te ao Māori, Māori food. It’s about talking about the past, the present, and the future, our taha wairua, putting it all our different beliefs aside and sharing time and energy.”

If you’re like me and want to learn more about Matariki, I recommend this episode from This is Kiwi podcast with Dr Rangi Mātāmua in which he also discusses living by the Maramataka and food sovereignty.

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Weekly bites

Our grocery prices have been among the highest in the world for years, a state of affairs that has significantly worsened in 2024 with a 56 percent increase in cost for a basket of common foods. Much of these costs are fuelled by our supermarket duopoly, with a 2020 Commerce Commission market study finding both Foodstuffs and Woolworths to be making excessive profits, due in part to the lack of competition. It is against this backdrop that the Commission announced it last week it was taking Foodstuffs North Island to the High Court for using land covenants to block rivals from setting up shop. At the same time, the Commission is also having to make an important decision about whether it will allow Foodstuffs, already the largest supermarket player in our current duopoly, to merge its North and South Island businesses, allowing them to take control of more than 60% of our grocery market.

Speaking of supermarkets, Eda Tang has written an eye-opening article about social supermarkets – an alternative to food banks that allows people experiencing food insecurity to select their own kai from the shelves using a points-based system rather than receiving one-size-fits-all food parcels. The fact that Foodstuffs North Island – who raked in $44.9 million net profit in 2023 – is the company behind many of these enterprises might provide a hint as to some of the criticisms Tang unpacks, but there are also those pointing out that the company is stepping in where the government is failing. It seems important to note here that food insecurity is by no means a niche issue, with one in five New Zealanders unable to afford enough food. Meanwhile, government budget cuts mean funding has been pulled from community food providers such as Auckland City Mission, who will be providing 27,000 fewer meals each week to families in need.

In lighter news, Eater has waded into the buttery layers of croissant trend criticism, bemoaning the seemingly constant need for bakeries to reinvent a classic. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the rise of the cronut, cruffin, croffles, the cube croissant, the triangular onioissant (an savoury-skewing onigiri croissant hybrid), the crookie (the TikTok viral cookie croissant mash-up) and the spiral-shaped Suprême. While I personally feel it’s hard to top a classic croissant au beurre, I do love to try a trend. For anyone in Aotearoa looking to try some kooky (crooky?) croissants, I recommend a trip to Takapuna which is fast becoming the croissant capital. Offerings include Domo Bakery who are serving up some unusual flavours and textures such as Soy Cream Mochi and Mont Blanc, while Luna Bakehouse have Supremes and Cruffins in a range of flavours and have also hopped on the flat croissant trend. And finally, you can find cubes and brownie croissants at Glory Patisserie, as well as this sausage croissant, which feels like a real Kiwi take on things – a sausage croll?

More-ish:

We’ve received an update from NZ Food Safety on the question of whether Samyang’s Buldak ramen will be recalled in Aotearoa: Spice lovers can cease their stockpiling, Buldak is here to stay, with NZFS deputy director-general Vincent Arbuckle noting that “these products do contain high levels of capsaicin, but they are clearly labelled to indicate their increased spiciness.”

Listen to episode 3 of Juggernaut – ‘Uranium on Your Breath’

David Lange emerges as an anti-nuclear champion. The Americans are furious and they become even angrier when he takes the stage at the Oxford Union. When an act of state terrorism sees a Greenpeace ship sunk, the public mood on nukes only solidifies. Follow now to make sure you get every episode.

Juggernaut was made with the support of NZ On Air.

Snack of the week

Six Barrel Soda Coffee & Cherry Syrup 500ml (approx. 15 drinks) – my bottle was gifted, but they retail for $24.95

Is a soda a snack? Only if you’re not really hungry, but often snacking is serving a purpose other than sustenance. Sometimes I’m bored, sometimes it’s break time and I know my tummy will grumble if I don’t seize the opportunity, sometimes I’m just feeling… snackish. I want a little something, maybe a little something caffeinated to get me through the afternoon, maybe a glass of soda made with this Coffee & Cherry Syrup the folks at Six Barrel Soda kindly sent to me (full disclosure!). As the bewildered owner of a pretty random brand of sparkling beverage maker (a Qarbo – I won’t link because it’s not amazing) I have tried quite a few Six Barrel syrups before. I’m particularly fond of their Hibiscus (like a virgin Hibiscus Mimosa), Grapefruit (a Paloma is my favourite cocktail) and classic Cola flavours (I won’t drink Coke but I do love cola). Coffee & Cherry is definitely a flavour combo that’s a bit outside my wheelhouse when it comes to a sparkling beverage, but it does bring together two flavours I adore, and which have been known to co-exist in dishes before – like cherry-studded tiramisu – so I know they’re happy bedfellows. They are also of a similar plant, coffee beans being the pit of a deep red fruit known as a coffee cherry.

And so I stacked a glass with ice, eyeballed a measure of syrup, topped it off with a glug of cold, freshly-carbonated water and took a sip. For a second, I wasn’t sure. Was it too much like a sweet iced coffee – the American kind, which hardly seem to deserve the title “coffee”? Perhaps my ratios were off. I tipped a little more syrup into my glass, gave it a stir and suddenly, it was delicious, almost like a light cold brew made a really clean, juicy coffee bean, one that might include “cherry” in its list of tasting notes. Given that coffee and cherry are both rather strong flavours, even with a decent amount of syrup, this beverage tasted light and fresh – perhaps better suited to summertime sipping, but I was happy to put on a wool jumper and drink my soda in a patch of pale sunlight. 8.5/10

Mā te wā, 

Lucinda