For the Luau, we cooked a pig -- the traditional style: in an imu pit. Here are a couple of photos to show how this is done.

First of all, you need a pit in the ground. Sounds easy, butit isn't always so easy in Hawaii, because the ground is - well - lava (which means: rock). That is: unless you are someplace with a thick layer of topsoil.

Then you need wood to burn and a large number of nice, round stones. These lava rocks come from the beach. One group of folks collected them and piled them up near the road. The other group transported them to BellyAcres, whenever they came by.

The next ingredient you need is chopped up banana trees (they are not trees, I know, I just cannot think of the right word right now so give me a break -- or send me email with the correct word).

And you need the whole thing! Leaves, stems and such.

An imu pit is essentially a steam cooker. And you need some way to generate steam. That's where the banana trees come in -- see further below.

Next step: You set the wood pile from image 1 on fire and wait till it completely burns down (several hours). In the meantime you have plenty of opportunity to prepare the food to put into the imu pit.

You cannot put food directly onto burning hot lava stones. It would just burn up. It needs to get wrapped. And the perfect wrapping is ti-leaves. (I hope I spell those leaves correctly). For another use of ti-leaves see the Luau page.

In this case you see a couple of potatoes on a bed of ti leaves. And under the leaves -- it doesn't only look like chicken wire... it IS chicken wire. It's used to hold the package together.

Important: the chicken wire must have been heated before, because some chicken wire has some paint or coating on it, which must be totally burnt off, otherwise it will be in your food! This includes zinc coating to make it rust proof. Zinc is good as a trace mineral, but the stress is on "trace".

Now the question is: what did Hawaiians use before there was chicken wire? I guess, they tied their food with ropes made from ti-leaves. For info on these ropes, see the Luau page.

This is Craig -- one of our "cooks" with a fully wrapped package and plenty more ti-leaves.

Now we did not only put potatoes into the pit. We also had sweet potatoes, bananas, plantains, bread fruit, turkey, and spam (yes, it's very important to have spam in a Luau -- don't ask me why).

Meanwhile... on the other side of town...

The imu pit is almost ready to be filled. Between lighting of the wood pile and this image was a span of about 6 hours. We lit the imu pit around 4 or 5 in the morning. The food went in around 10 or 11 ish if I remember correctly. The Luau was around 5 in the afternoon.

Anyway. As you see, these rocks are now HOT!

Voila: the main star of the Luau -- a pig (at this point, very dead). It's a punker pig -- easily recognizable from the tatoos on it's belly. Just kidding.

No don't worry, the pig was bought normally from whatever place it is where you can get complete pigs. The problem was: it was frozen! Now that wouldn't work too well with an imu pit.

To solve that problem we had to convert a hot tub at Belly Acres into a pig-bath...The hot tub was a wood-fired contraption, by the way. Interesting construction. Too bad I didn't think of taking a photo -- especially with the pig in it.

Soo, what now with the pig? Same as with the pototoes: ti-leaves and chicken wire!

But first: how can we make sure that something as big as this pig cooks as thoroughly as the rest of the food in the pit? Just make sure the pig cooks both from the inside as well as from the outside...

Therefore: take a few of the hot stones and place them inside the pig first. Now these rocks are very hot, as I mentioned. So we got an instant treat of roast pig smell (and burnt meat smell too, I should mention)

Cover all this with more banana leaves. On top of those, we put a strong tarp -- it might be a ground cloth for a tent. It has to be heat proof, of course!

Then, to keep this down, to generate some pressure, and to insulate, we pile lava sand on top. Essentially this is crushed lava rocks (Craig worked all night with a hammer to make this pile of sand -- just kidding).

That's what the finished imu pit looks like. It doesn't look very exciting, right? Especially as it should not leak any steam. Every hour or so somebody had to make sure it was still tight and put sand wherever steam came up.

Do you see the little hill in the middle? When this hill disappears, then the pig has gotten so soft, that the rib cage collapsed (after about 6 hours). That's the signal that the food is ready, you can dig it up and start the Luau!