What is a hāngī? The Māori earth oven explained

What is a hāngī? A hāngī ‘earth oven’ is the traditional Māori way of cooking for a crowd: stones are heated in a wood fire, the food goes into a pit on top of them in baskets, and the pit is covered with wet cloth and earth so that the food steams for about three hours. The word means both the oven and the meal that comes out of it. This guide follows a hāngī from the first spadeful to the moment it is lifted, with the te reo Māori word for each step and each object, every one checked in Te Aka Māori Dictionary.

Updated 6 November 2026 · 8 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

What does hāngī mean?

Te Aka gives hāngī two meanings: an earth oven that cooks food with steam and heat from heated stones, and the food cooked in it. So you can dig a hāngī, and you can also eat one. Say it HAH-ngee: both vowels are long, which is what the macrons mark, and the ng is the sound in the middle of singer. Te Aka notes that the word is also spelt hāngi, with a short final vowel.

The other common word for the same thing is umu, an oven or earth oven, and Te Aka lists several more:

In English, New Zealanders talk of putting down or laying a hāngī when it goes into the ground, and lifting it when it comes out.

How a hāngī is cooked, step by step

The steps below follow Māori Television’s guide from its series Hāngī Pit Masters, and Te Ara’s description of the traditional method. Families and experts each have their own ways, often handed down along with the stones, so treat the times and sizes as a guide rather than a rule.

1. Dig the pit: keri, rua

To keri ‘dig’ the rua ‘pit, hole’. Māori Television says to dig it to just over knee-deep; Te Ara calls it a shallow pit.

2. Build the fire: wahie, ahi, tahu

The wahie ‘firewood’ is stacked over the pit, thick logs around the outside and thinner wood in the middle, with the stones on top so that they heat in the ahi ‘fire’ and drop evenly to the bottom as the wood burns through. Māori Television recommends mānuka or kānuka, two native tea-trees. To light it is tahu ‘to set on fire, light’. The burning takes three to three and a half hours, and someone keeps moving the burning logs so that every stone heats. Another way, the one Te Aka calls a kōnao, is to heat the stones in a fire beside the pit and move them in once they are hot.

3. Heat the stones: kōhatu

The kōhatu ‘stones’ are the oven. Māori Television says they reach about 600 to 700 °C, and that the best stone in Aotearoa is andesite, a volcanic rock found throughout the country, with basalt from landscape suppliers as the alternative. When the fire has burned down, most of the ash and the unburnt wood are taken out and the stones are levelled across the bottom of the pit. Te Aka even has a verb for putting hot stones on the food: pīnohinohi.

4. Fill the baskets: kete

While the stones heat, the food is prepared and packed. Today it goes into wire or stainless-steel baskets; the everyday Māori word for a basket is kete. Māori Television lines them with the big leathery leaves of the puka tree, threading the stalks through the wire until none shows, which keeps the food moist and stops the meat burning. Cabbage or banana leaves are the substitute. Te Aka has two older words from the same job: a kororipa is a plaited band for lining an earth oven, and kōtonu are the leaves set around a traditional earth oven to stop food falling onto the hot stones.

5. Into the pit: meat first, vegetables on top

Te Ara and Māori Television agree on the order: meat at the bottom, nearest the heat, and vegetables above it. Seafood, if there is any, goes on the very top, and Māori Television warns that its juices drip onto whatever is underneath.

6. Cover it: whāriki, oneone

The food is covered before the earth goes back. Traditionally that was leaves, and Te Ara names whāriki ‘mats’ of woven flax; Māori Television mentions woven nīkau fronds. Today it is usually sacking or cloth, soaked well in water. The sacks overlap the edges of the pit, the oneone ‘earth, soil’ goes around the sides first and then over the top, and the water from the cloth runs down onto the stones and turns to steam.

7. Let it steam: korohū

Steam is korohū. For the first twenty minutes or so, Māori Television says, someone watches for steam escaping through the soil and covers each leak with more earth. Then the hāngī is left. Te Ara says the soil traps the steam for a few hours, the exact time depending on the size of the hāngī; Māori Television says about three hours, depending on how much food is in it.

8. Lift it: huke, hura

To uncover a hāngī, the earth is scraped off gently, in the reverse order to the way it went on so that nothing caves in onto the food, then the sacks are peeled back and the baskets lifted out. Te Aka’s word huke means to dig up or uncover by removing the earth, and hura means to take off a covering. Te Aka’s example for a second word for steam, koromamahu, is about exactly this moment:

The whole day in two sentences

These come from Verbavia’s te reo Māori course. In one reading passage a family puts down a hāngī for a grandfather’s birthday; in another, a family is going to the marae tomorrow:

The first two are in the passive, the form Māori prefers when what happened to the food matters more than who did it: tunua ‘cooked’, whakatakotoria ‘laid down’, hukea ‘uncovered’, kainga ‘eaten’.

What goes in a hāngī

Māori Television’s list of vegetables is any firm root vegetable: kūmara, potato, yam, pumpkin, squash and taro, left in their skins, which hold them together. Meat goes in as big cuts, rolled roasts and whole chickens, seasoned with a little salt and kawakawa, the leaf of the native pepper tree. Stuffing is packed into wet muslin bags, a cabbage can have its core cut out and filled with butter, and a steamed pudding can go around the sides of the basket.

The history of the kūmara, the other foods Māori grew and gathered, and the everyday words for eating and cooking are all in Māori food words, which gives the hāngī only a short section; this page is the long version.

Before pots and wire baskets

Te Ara describes the traditional method in the same shape as today’s: hot rocks and water make steam in a shallow pit, food is layered meat first, covered with leaves or flax matting, and the soil put back. Sacking and cloth came later. It adds that Māori never cooked in the buildings they slept in: food was prepared in the open air or in cooking sheds. Around Rotorua, hāngī have been cooked for centuries with the ground’s own geothermal steam.

The hāngī is still used for large groups on special occasions, because it cooks a great deal of food without a commercial kitchen. On a marae the food is served in the dining hall, the wharekai, and Te Aka records a figurative name for a marae kitchen, Te umu tao roa a Tahu ‘the long cooking oven of Tahu’. The meal that closes a pōwhiri is explained on that page.

Hāngī words at a glance

Where to go from here

Food runs through Matariki, the Māori new year, too: the stars linked with food from the ground, the trees and the sea are in Matariki words. For what to say at the table, from I’m hungry to thank you for the food, see Māori food words. The sentences above come from Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course (our own), where you can hear them in Papa Reo’s native te reo voice.

Sources

1. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand: Māori foods – kai Māori – traditional cooking and preserving (the hāngī, Rotorua, cooking apart from sleeping houses)
2. Māori Television: Make your own hāngī (Hāngī Pit Masters), Internet Archive copy of 8 May 2022
3. Wikipedia: Hāngī (the English phrases “put down” and “lift”; special occasions; methods handed down with the stones)
4. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hāngī — earth oven; food cooked in an earth oven; also as hāngi.
5. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: umu — oven, earth oven (synonyms imu, ōmu, oumu); Te umu tao roa a Tahu — the kitchen of a marae; pīnohinohi — to place hot stones on food.
6. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: earth oven — hapī, tōpīpī, kōnao, kororipa, kōtonu.
7. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: keri — to dig.
8. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: rua — hole, pit.
9. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: wahie — firewood.
10. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ahi — fire.
11. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tahu — to set on fire, light; to cook.
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kōhatu — stone, rock.
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kete — basket, kit.
14. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whāriki — mat; to cover with a mat.
15. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: oneone — earth, soil.
16. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: steam — korohū, koromamahu (with the hāngī example).
17. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: hura — to remove a covering, uncover.
18. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: huke — to dig up, expose by removing the earth, uncover.
19. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tao — to cook.
20. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: puka — Meryta sinclairii.
21. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: nīkau — the native palm.
22. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mānuka and kānuka — tea-tree, white tea-tree.
23. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kawakawa — pepper tree.
24. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: taro, paukena (loan, pumpkin), kāpeti (loan, cabbage), poaka (loan, pig), heihei (chicken).