Meat pies with the top off? Fish and chips in bread? A new thread online has revealed the different ways Kiwis eat their favourite NZ foods.
On the New Zealand subreddit a conversation began around the “correct way to eat NZ foods” after u/Machine_Excellent made a post describing how they chow down on MallowPuffs.
“Smash top on forehead,” they wrote. “Pick off all the shattered chocolate. Eat off the marshmallow. Eat the bottom biscuit last.”
He then asked the rest of New Zealand “what other foods have a correct way to eat?” and the people - the ones on Reddit anyway - answered.
Loads of comments were talking about the humble meat pie and how taking off the lid is the way to get it in ya.
“People might be horrified,” wrote u/Aperson004. “But when I eat a meat pie, I eat the pastry on top first before the rest of the pie.”
“Use a teaspoon to remove the lid so that it cools a little,” said u/BlacksmithNZ. “Add tomato sauce and stir into the mince, then scoop and eat. Finally, the pastry gets picked up rolled up a bit and eaten.”
“Another variation is to put the pie between two slices of bread and gobble down a pie sandwich quick smart,” added u/Tane-Tane-mahuta.
All forms of chocolate, from your standard bar to ice cream, can be devoured the same way apparently.
For a Cadbury Crunchie bar, u/GreyDaveNZ says to “bite off chocolate from outside, leaving the hokey pokey ‘naked’. Then, eat the hokey pokey ‘nude’.”
For the Choc Bar ice cream, u/MattMayo recommends a similar method: “Eat the outer layers and save the chocolate to last”.
For the Toffee Pop cookie, u/Torus_Colony agrees, stating you should “lick all the chocolate off the top layer. Scoop up the layer of revealed caramel with your bottom teeth like a savage. Lick the remaining chocolate off the biscuit base. Consume biscuit.”
Most people shared the pie and chocolate methods, but there were plenty of other notable eating techniques for common Kiwi kai.
The Kiwi classic fish and chips should be eaten by “buttering some nice soft bread, placing chips or potato fritters between the bread, and adding tomato sauce,” according to u/GreyDaveNZ (again).
Rather than the traditional method of cutting a kiwifruit in half with a spoon and scooping the insides, u/computer_d says to “squash it up, skin and all, and consume.” Yuck.
Vogel's bread is u/Halfcaste_brown’s food of choice. He says to "toast on maximum settings 1.5 times. Immediately after toasting, spread real butter so it will melt, finished with a thin smattering of vegemite.”
“Bogan nachos,” according to u/Terrible-Jellyfish24, are made by combining “Mrs Macs chilli beef ‘n’ cheese pie with a bag of Doritos.”
When it comes to KFC Bread rolls, u/stalin_stans says to “open and put in a layer of chips, some chicken, chicken skin and a dollop of potato and gravy”. This will give you “a violent case of the runs and make you swear off KFC (for 3 months).”
I’m all for a bit of Kiwi ingenuity so will get some of these methods in rotation this weekend, apart from that kiwifruit one - there is no need for that.
