Geothermal Goodness

“When I first see Shane Beattie engulfed in clouds of steam, sweat running in rivulets from beneath his white chef’s cap,” Wanda Hennig writes in an article for South Africa’s Independent Online, “he looks like he’s fishing, using rope for line and woven grass bags for bait.” “In fact, the bags he’s casting into the furiously roiling water are filled with green lipped mussels, prawns and corn on the cob. ‘Our Maori people are one of the few people in the world who still cook using the geothermal waters from deep down within the earth. We’ve done this for 600 to 700 years,’ says Te Taru White, chief executive officer at Te Puia, the Maori Arts and Crafts Institute on the outskirts of Rotorua. ‘And this,’ he says pointing to Chef Beattie and probably the world’s hottest and weirdest cooking pot, ‘might be regarded as the world’s most unique cooking cauldron. It’s called Ngararatuatara.’”