Kalua

Kalua is a traditional Hawaiian technique for cooking food, most often a whole pig, in an imu, an underground earth oven; the word kalua itself means to cook in an underground oven in the Hawaiian language. Cooks build a hardwood fire in a pit and heat stones in it to a very high temperature over several hours, then spread the hot stones over the coals and line the pit with vegetation such as banana and ti leaves; the salted meat is placed on this bed, sometimes with hot stones inserted into its cavity to help it cook through, then covered with more vegetation and buried under several inches of soil, which traps the steam and heat inside. The meat cooks for several hours before being uncovered and shredded for serving, traditionally at a luau feast, and its characteristic flavor comes from the hardwood smoke and, especially, from the ti leaves the meat is wrapped in; modern versions sometimes substitute wet burlap or steel mesh for some of the traditional earth-oven materials.