Hāngī-Style Pork Shoulder

A hāngī is a Māori earth oven: a pit, river stones heated on a hard fire for hours, wet sacking laid over the top, kai stacked in baskets, and the soil shovelled back so nobody opens it for three hours. The signature flavor is steam first and smoke a distant second — that faint earth-and-wood note that gets into everything at once. It is also a whole day of communal work, and a backyard smoker isn't a hāngī and shouldn't pretend to be one.

What travels is the structure: heavy smoke early, then a sealed steam phase where meat and root vegetables share one pan of liquid. Kiawe suits the first half — hot, clean, mild sweetness that doesn't fight kūmara. Get your bark fully set before the wrap goes on, because once it's sealed nothing else gets in.

Ingredients

• 8-9 lb bone-in pork shoulder (Boston butt), fat cap trimmed to 1/4 inch
• 3 Tbsp coarse salt + 1 Tbsp coarse black pepper — that's the whole rub
• 2 lbs kūmara or orange sweet potato, 2-inch chunks
• 1 1/2 lbs waxy potatoes, halved
• 1 lb pumpkin or kabocha, 2-inch chunks
• 1 head cabbage, cut into 6 wedges
• 1 cup water or unsalted stock
• Deep foil pan and heavy-duty foil

Cook Sequence

1. Salt and pepper the shoulder hard the night before and leave it uncovered in the fridge. A dry surface takes smoke; a wet one just steams under it.
2. 250F indirect, fat cap up, two kiawe chunks to start and one more roughly every 90 minutes through hour five. Thin blue smoke the whole way.
3. Run 5-6 hours to 165-170F with a hard mahogany bark. Don't chase the stall and don't crank the pit to beat it.
4. Move the shoulder into the foil pan, pack the root vegetables around it, add the cup of liquid, and seal with two layers of foil crimped tight. This is the steam phase — the part that borrows from the pit.
5. Back on at 275F for another 2-2.5 hours, until a probe slides through the shoulder with no resistance around 203F.
6. Cabbage wedges into the pan for the last 45 minutes only. Any earlier and they turn gray and give up water.
7. Rest the sealed pan an hour in a dry cooler. Opening it early dumps the steam you spent all day building.
8. Pull the pork by hand into big shreds, roll the vegetables through the pan liquid, and serve it straight out of the pan.

Round Out the Plate

• Hawaiian Sweet Potato — if you can't source kūmara, this is the stand-in
• Roasted Vegetables — for a crisp-edged counterpoint to everything steamed
• Everyday Cabbage Salad — raw crunch against eight hours of soft