Aotearoa and Australia · Volume 03, The Waka, the Hāngī and the Tide

Takakau

Name: Takakau
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Makes 8
Cuisine: Māori Food
Ingredients: 2½ cups high-grade flour; 2 tsp baking powder; ½ tsp salt; ¾ cup milk; ¼ cup olive oil or melted butter; as needed neutral oil, to cook; as needed butter or garlic herb butter, to brush

Māori, Aotearoa

Takakau, whānau flatbread cooked in the skillet: a stack of pale golden flatbreads with scattered dark charred blister spots, the top one brushed glossy with melted butter.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: Researched from 188 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Christall Lowe, of Ngāti Kauwhata and Ngāti Maniapoto, on her own version, from her cookbook Kai Feast: "I call our whānau version of flat bread 'takakau'... this is something we make on the regular, especially to go with umu pulled pork. We cook this over an open fire in the back yard, or when camping, and of course in the trusty skillet on the stovetop in our kitchen."

by Māori, Aotearoa

Fern root filled the gap horticulture on its own could not close, and Manuka Henare's account of a specific illustrative tradition makes the ecological logic vivid rather than abstract: a high-born woman is said to have refused a kūmara gardener as a husband, since his crop could be raided in wartime, refused an eeler too, since he was only useful when rivers flooded, and a fisherman, useful only in calm seas, and married instead a man who could dig fern root, "so there would always be food." The proverb behind this, te tūtanga tē unuhia, "the food portion that is always present," names exactly what aruhe was worth: not a delicacy, a guarantee. Digging it was genuinely brutal labour, the best roots lay up to a metre underground, and the pounding that followed, breaking cooked root down with a dedicated wooden beater called a patu aruhe to separate starchy flesh from fibre, left a paste still carrying three or four times its own weight in indigestible strands, in Joseph Banks's own description from Cook's 1769 voyage. It survived as a staple for centuries, and it was still, by the mid nineteenth century, being abandoned fast: potato, introduced by visiting sailors in the 1780s, grew more easily than kūmara and helped provision war parties so directly that some historians have argued the so-called musket wars of the 1810s to 1830s deserve to be remembered partly as potato wars instead. A Māori-language newspaper editorial from 1861 mourns the shift already well under way in its own words, that fern root and pohue had been left off in favour of what it calls, bluntly, putrid corn, "great indeed is the badness of that exceedingly bad food," a period source lamenting a nutritional decline in real time rather than a historian reconstructing it after the fact. This chapter did not find any evidence of aruhe surviving today as a living, regularly eaten dish, unlike rēwena, boil-up, takakau and even kānga pīrau, all of which still have practising cooks; that absence is stated here plainly rather than implied away.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes 8. About 45 minutes.

Ingredients

2½ cups high-grade flour
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
¾ cup milk
¼ cup olive oil or melted butter
as needed neutral oil, to cook
as needed butter or garlic herb butter, to brush

Method

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt.
Add the milk and olive oil or melted butter, and mix until it comes together.
Turn out and knead a few minutes until smooth, adding flour if sticky.
Rest, covered, 30 minutes.
Divide into 8 pieces, roll each into a ball, then roll out to about 15 cm across.
Heat a pan lightly oiled with neutral oil over medium-high heat and cook one flatbread at a time, about 1 minute on the first side until golden-patched and puffed, then 45 seconds to 1 minute on the second.
Brush with butter and keep stacked under a tea towel to stay soft.

What a modern chef changes

The dough's rest and the pan's heat both given real precision rather than judged by eye.

Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung.

Method

Rest the dough in the fridge for a full hour rather than 30 minutes at room temperature, relaxing the gluten fully for a more tender, less chewy bread.
Cook on a carbon steel pan heated past smoking point, then dropped to medium the moment the dough goes in, for the same char-and-puff a live fire gives without the smoke a British kitchen cannot reproduce indoors.
Serve with a garlic herb butter made fresh, melted butter worked with crushed garlic and finely chopped herbs, cooked briefly and brushed on hot, matching Lowe's own serving instruction rather than a plain butter finish.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists