Earth oven

Earth ovens have been used in many places and cultures in the past, and the presence of such cooking pits is a key sign of human settlement often sought by archaeologists.

Today, many communities still use cooking pits for ceremonial or celebratory occasions, including the indigenous Fijian lovo, the Hawaiian imu, the Māori hāngī, the Mexican barbacoa, and the New England clambake.

This method is essentially a permanent earth oven made out of clay or firebrick with a constantly burning, very hot fire in the bottom.

In Central Texas, there are large "burned-rock middens" speculated to be used for large-scale cooking of plants of various sorts, especially the bulbs of sotol.

The curanto of the Chiloé Archipelago consists of shellfish, meat, potatoes, milcao chapaleles, and vegetables traditionally prepared in an earth oven.

[citation needed] The huatia or watia and pachamanca are traditional earth ovens of the Andean regions of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile.

In early Taiwanese agricultural society, adults would take children to build earth ovens and cook simple ingredients like sweet potatoes and taro.

[citation needed] Among Bedouin and Tuareg nomads, a simple earth oven is used – often when men travel without family or kitchen equipment in the desert.

When baking bread, the wheat or barley flour is mixed with water and some salt and then placed directly into the hot sands beneath the camp fire.

The bread is often mixed with molten fat (sometimes oil or butter) and labneh (goat milk yoghurt) and then formed into a dough before eating.

[citation needed] In Papua New Guinea, "mumu" is used by Tok Pisin and English speakers, but each of the other hundreds of local languages has its own word.

[citation needed] It is a common day-to-day method of preparing roasted foods, with modern ovens being restricted to western-style houses.

[citation needed] Many pot boilers from British prehistoric sites are now considered to be the by-product of cooking with stones, in something similar to a Polynesian oven.

[8] Examples from the European prehistoric vary in form but are generally bowl-shaped and shallow in depth (30–45 cm), with diameters between 0.5 and 2 metres.