The drama of smoke and fire is part of the multi-sensory hāngi experience.

Rewi Spraggon never met his grandfather. But his grandfather is with him every time he cooks a traditional hāngi feast.

"I'm cooking with my grandfather's stones. His hāngi rocks. He died in the early 60s and he passed them to my father. When you are passing the stones on to someone, you are also passing on the techniques and knowledge of that person."

That knowledge is why he can call himself "the hāngi master". It's why he was in charge of massive public hāngi collaborations at Wellington on a Plate earlier this year and at the recent Taste of Auckland, and why he's an expert cooking show host on Maori TV.

SUPPLIED Rewi Spraggon says only food cooked in the ground on wood-heated rocks can be called true hāngi.

Spraggon says hāngi should be New Zealand's national dish. In so many ways it has the pedigree to be "the one".

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Kevin Stent Putting down a hāngi on the Wellington. Real hāngi is appearing in urban areas.

"Sure we have the lamb roast and pavlova and all that, but I think when you look at authenticity, it's the hāngi."

Hāngi gives food smoky earthy flavours that no other dish does. While the modern world is rediscovering the joys of slow cooking, the hāngi has been nailing that for centuries.

And then there is the amazing back story that all great food needs. Hāngi is a cooking method that goes back farther than anything else in this country. It is cooking in the purest sense of family and friends bonding over food. It's true comfort food that evokes happy memories.

Hiakai Monique Fiso says you learn about Maori culture when you eat hāngi.

High-flying chef Monique Fiso, whose pop-up fine dining events Hiakai, is part of the new eagerness to explore New Zealand's cuisine. She creates dishes that celebrate traditional Maori ingredients and techniques.

She puts her thoughts on hāngi's importance in the just published book Kai and Culture: Food stories from Aotearoa.

"Eating Māori food is a great way for the broader community to learn about the kai, the customs and the history of the indigenous people of Aotearoa ... when you witness something like hāngi – the smoke, the fire, the kai, the rocks, the back-breaking intensity of it all – you begin to understand how ancient Māori lived."

Karaka Cafe Karaka Cafe in Wellington occasionally uses a pit on the waterfront to cook real hāngi food the traditional way.

But that effort to do a hāngi properly is what has led to it being modernised.

While hangi lives on in traditional communities and as school fundraisers and so on, the most common hāngi you'll experience in urban New Zealand now is one cooked above ground in a steel multicooker. The food will be stacked, there may or may not be rocks, but the heat will be gas-powered and the smokiness will come from wood chips.

This isn't hāngi, Spraggon says. It's steaming. And he says it doesn't taste like hāngi.

Gerhard Egger The hāngi team at Te Raakanui Marae with laden food baskets for the Kawhia Kai Festival. Hāngi is a food for big celebrations and ceremonies..

"You can tell the difference between them. I've used them and you can throw in manuka and you can throw in everything, but it is not a hāngi. They are just steam cookers. It's a boil up. That's how I describe it."

A recent post on the popular Kai Māori Facebook page asked if ground or steamer cooking was best. It got a huge response with most admitting a ground hāngi was the ultimate, but steamer cooking was OK, if that's all you could do or get hold of.

"Never beat a ground hāngi. Drum or steamer mainly because of fire restrictions," said Rex Rogers, summing up the general feeling.

LAINE MOGER/FAIRFAX NZ Flavours of smoke and earth through vegetables and meat makes hāngi distinctive.

Outside of special occasions and fundraising feasts, many cities have small business operations with steamers that provide a hāngi fix. In Christchurch, they include the Christchurch Hāngi House, Hāngi Heaven and Charmaine Smith's Hornby-based Hearty Hāngis.

She makes it clear her hāngi is steamed and she cooks most weekends.

Smith has plenty of regular customers and "my own little magic secret" with the flavours that she's telling no-one.

"People like it because it is Māori food and people like Kiwi kai. Every nationality in the world likes it. Lots of tourists like to try my hāngi."

A real in-the-ground hāngi takes a lot of wood, a site where urban fire bylaws won't get it closed down, and skill in managing heat and food stacking.

Wood is burned to heat the (right) rocks. That can take five or six hours before cooking even starts. The hot rocks go in the bottom of an earth pit with some embers for smoke. Meat and vegetables are stacked on top, then covered with sacks and earth. The food cooks for more hours, with the cooks shovelling dirt on top to halt any escaping steam.

That all builds to the sights, sounds and smells of the big reveal as the coverings are peeled off.

Hāngi is all of this, Spraggon says.

"It's everything, it's the flavours, the process, you have got an earthy, smoky flavour that is coming through your proteins and through your veg that you can not mimic. You can't get it any other way."

﻿An interesting mix of traditional and modern cooking methods can be seen at Wellington's waterfront Karaka Cafe. It serves up hāngi-style flavours in food from smoking ovens year round. But every few weeks over summer a real hāngi is laid in a pit in land on the waterfront.

Co-owner Keri Retimanu says hāngi is Karaka's signature lunch dish and all its popular eggs benedict dishes feature hāngi-style hash.

But it's the real hāngi pit that gets people most excited. She says it is so labour intensive it will only go into action for a minimum 200 booking, but over summer there is a cook-up for the public every three weeks.

"The first time we did one, people were coming down and saying 'is that what I think it is?' They were doing selfie photos and just loving it."

Every cook-up was sold out and people are already clamouring for this summer's series to start, Retimanu says.

Karaka's pit hosted Spraggon and cooked dishes by local restaurants for Wellington on a Plate. It went so well, she's convinced hāngi has a strong future, even in urban settings.

"I believe so. Because it can be interpreted in a modern style." And her customers are mostly middle-income Pākehā, so the enthusiasm covers all Kiwis.

Spraggon has a new series Hāngi Pit Masters coming up on Maori TV that shows his work with star chefs to create new hāngi dishes, and he's launching a new real urban -hāngi business, Hāngi Master in Auckland, with plans to expand to other cities

He has this dream of what might be possible if real hāngi got the respect it deserves. It's a hāngi restaurant with a big dirt floor in the middle, four hangi pits going at once, and people soaking up the spectacle. "That's what we need, that's what we need," he says.

"A thousand years of cooking can't be lost. This art form can't be lost. I say to all Kiwis this is your culture, too. Embrace it, this our point of difference in the world. We can bring Chinese, Italian, Indian into our hāngi. It's more about the process. Imagine hāngi Indian and everything is done through the pit. That is crazy, but it would be amazing flavours."