Hawaiian Airlines flies to Auckland, New Zealand, so Jim and I took the 8-1/2-hour flight last week to check out the foods there. It is autumn there, and the weather was wonderful, cool with a bit of wind. In fact, on South Island, it started to snow! Since Hawaiian Airlines does not fly daily, you can plan your vacation around its schedule.
Hawaiian Airlines flies to Auckland, New Zealand, so Jim and I took the 8-1/2-hour flight last week to check out the foods there. It is autumn there, and the weather was wonderful, cool with a bit of wind. In fact, on South Island, it started to snow! Since Hawaiian Airlines does not fly daily, you can plan your vacation around its schedule.
New Zealand is proud of its multiethnic population. Anywhere you go, you will hear Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Indian, mixed in with the accents of New Zealanders.
The American dollar is worth $1.47 New Zealand dollars, so your dollar goes a lot further. However, remember the 15 percent sales tax usually included in the price.
New Zealand has some unique and interesting foods. I was not ashamed to ask questions, and I asked the stock guy at the market and the woman sitting next to me at the restaurant. Here are the answers.
Hangi cooking is Maori cooking in an imu or pit dug in the ground and cooked with heated rocks. Fish, chicken, pork, lamb, mutton, along with sweet potatoes or kumara and pumpkin are among the foods placed in the pit.
Kumara chips are sweet potato fries.
Kumara rosti are sweet potato hash browns.
Pompoms are round, fried mashed potatoes.
Hokey pokey are hard caramel and hokey pokey ice cream is vanilla ice cream with little balls of hard caramel.
Marmite is fermented yeast that is a favorite spread on toast in the morning.
Jaffle is a toasted stuffed sandwich made in a jaffle sandwich maker.
Weet Bix is a boxed breakfast cereal, paper-thin and formed into about 2-by-4-inch pillows.
Feigoa is a fruit found in Brazil and New Zealand. The skin looks like a guava but is eaten like a kiwi, usually with a spoon and tastes like a combination of kiwi and guava.
Hapuka is a type of grouper fish from the area.
Kingfish, or yellowtail, is a local fish of North Island with firm texture and succulent, dark flesh that lightens when cooked.
Tarahiki is a fish caught south of East Cape and the Cook Straight, with a medium texture and thick flakes. It turns white when cooked.
Hoki and ling are also white-fleshed fish.
Porae is a gray fish that looks like a tilapia, and is moist and tender with thick flakes.
Blue moki has a firm texture; its flesh holds its shape and is greyish white when cooked. It is caught on the east coast of New Zealand, where there is a sandy seafloor.
Yellowbelly flounder has a delicate texture, white flesh and flakes easily when cooked
Piper, or garfish, looks like flying fish that lost its wings. It has a medium texture with thick flakes. These fish are often found in schools in the harbors and bays around New Zealand.
Alfonsino sure looks exactly like our menpachi — red with large eyes.
Cando kina is uni or sea urchin.
I was so excited I did not have an allergic reaction to the breads in Auckland. The wheat comes from Australia, and azodicarbonamide that is added to American wheat flour to bleach it or bromine that is a bulking agent to reduce baking time are banned in Australia and New Zealand. They also do not have their wheat sprayed with Roundup to hasten ripening.
I enjoyed eating French bread with my squid ink pasta, something I am not able to do back home.
Australia and New Zealand also do not allow certain food dyes, so at Countdown Market two doors from our hotel, I bought red dye No. 124, green dye No. 102/133 and blue dye No. 133.
Auckland turned its fishing industry into a tourist attraction. Surrounding the Auckland Fish Auction are a couple of rows of restaurants. Too bad we can’t do the same around Suisan Fish Market, even just possibly a coffee shop, a seafood restaurant and an ethnic restaurant that features the local seafood of Hilo!
A very popular restaurant in Auckland is Depot Eatery and Oyster Bar on Federal Street. It is in the SkyCity, in the Sky Tower complex, which is the tallest manmade structure in New Zealand and a must if you are into bungee jumping. Chef Al Brown grew up in a sheep and cattle family but his love of cooking led him to opening a restaurant. We enjoyed Depot so much, we had dinner there twice. The oysters, clams and mussels are at their peak right now, and needless to say Jim and I ate them to our hearts content! They were plump, juicy and sweet.
To start, soft tortillas, cut into wedges, are served with hummus in a rectangle wooden bowl. In his cookbook, “Depot Oyster Bar Eatery,” Brown claims, “I might be going out on a limb here, but I’ll stand my ground. The Depot tortilla are better than any you’ll find at any of the ‘Mexican’ joints in this city.”
Flour Tortillas
Makes: 12 tortillas
1 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
Pour milk and oil into a saucepan and warm slightly over low heat. Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Pour the warm milk into the dry ingredients and bring together with your hands to form a ball. Knead for 2 to 3 minutes, then cover with cling wrap and rest for 15 minutes.
Divide the dough into 12 or 24 balls.
On a lightly floured board, using a rolling pin, roll out the tortillas to as thin as possible. Layer between parchment paper and a dusting of flour. Cook each tortilla on a hot grill or in a dry skillet for 1 minute each side until puffed and warmed through. Layer between parchment paper, cover and refrigerate until needed.
Small bites
New Zealand has a population of more than a million people. Add the tourists and you have a lot of people. So, what do you think the odds are that we sit next to a woman and her husband from Australia at dinner at the Depot Eatery and the very next night, with more than 1,000 restaurants to choose from, we end up at Ortolana Restaurant and there are the couple again! We don’t even know their names, but I asked her a lot of foodie questions and she was so helpful. We asked them where they were dining the next night and, unfortunately, they were going back to Australia.
Email me at audreywilson808@gmail.com.