Top Eats You Should Sink Your Teeth in on Your New Zealand Holiday

If you encounter food from New Zealand for the first time, you may find it fanciful, if not a little bit strange. You might expect it them to be highly similar to British food, given that the country was once a British colony. Over the years, though, Maori and immigrant cultures, as well as New Zealand’s strong reliance on locally sourced food, have led to the development of a unique Kiwiana cuisine found nowhere else. Try these top eats you should sink your teeth in on your New Zealand holiday.

ANZAC biscuits

This is the top eats in New Zealand. These oat-coated biscuits can trace their roots back to World War I, when New Zealand wives and mothers baked biscuits to send their husbands and sons fighting in the war. However, these biscuits were made with ingredients that don’t spoil easily so they will survive the journey. From being hard and flat, these biscuits have evolved into something sweet and chewy.

Candies

Kiwis love their candy and have a lot of them available nowhere else. The most popular of these are chocolate fish, pineapple lumps, and Tim Tams. Chocolate fish are simply strawberry marshmallows shaped like fish and covered with chocolate. Pineapple lumps are chocolate-coated chewy candies that taste like pineapples. Tim Tams are chocolate biscuits filled with chocolate mousse and covered with more chocolate.

Fergburger

A lot of Kiwis (and burger enthusiasts from elsewhere) travel to Queenstown just to have a taste of burgers made at Fergburger. This joint, found only in Queensland and nowhere else, serves some of the biggest and most inventive gourmet burgers in the world, with fancy names like Bun Laden, Holier Than Thou, and Cockadoodle Oink. Good news is, if you are a Muslim who wants to try this, Fergburger also offers a selection of halal line. But to ve safe, just make sure to ask before you order.

Fish and chips

Fish and chips may be an iconic British snack, but the Kiwis have totally made it their own too. However, the dish is typically made with Hoki, snapper or Tarakihi, and sometimes with scallops and squid.

Hangi

The hangi is a traditional method of Maori cooking where meats and root vegetables are placed in baskets or wire racks and then placed on top of heated stones in a dug fire pit. The fire pit is then buried and the food is allowed to cook for a few hours. Food cooked this way tastes like they were steamed, though the root vegetables may have a bitter aftertaste.

Hokey pokey ice cream

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In the middle of the day, taking a break and killing the heat with double double chocolate treat #hokeypokey #hokeypokeyicecream @sharmilashinde_actor
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New Zealand’s favourite ice cream is vanilla ice cream mixed with lumps of honeycomb toffee. It’s uniquely Kiwi, but it’s becoming easy to find copycats outside the country.

Pavlova

The pavlova is a light and airy meringue cake topped with fresh fruit and cream. According to the story, this dessert was invented to honour the 19th-century Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova on her visit to New Zealand.

Roast lamb

New Zealand is sheep country, and it is said the sheep population there outnumber the humans ten to one. So it comes as no surprise that lamb and mutton are an important part of the Kiwi diet. Kiwi roast lamb is particularly tasty because it’s made using fresh meat from locally grown sheep.

Seafood

In New Zealand, you are usually no more than an hour away from the sea. As thus, seafood is a big part of Kiwi cuisine, and many of the seafood you’ll find there are endemic to the country. Bluff oysters, green-lipped mussels, tuatua clams and whitebait fish are something that you can easily find here.

You can find halal food here. You won’t know how good New Zealand food is until you’ve actually tasted it. So book your trip to New Zealand right now and have a taste of these awesome Kiwi eats.