Rewana bread.

[Sandy]

I'm not exactly sure of the exact origin, or dates when rewana bread was first made, but I suspect both the potato and sweet potato were both made popular when the country was colonised..

Rewana bread is basically normal bread, but instead of normal water being used to make the bread, the water from boiling either normal potatoes or kumera was used.. the only thing was thy didn't add salt to the water when cooking the potatoes or kumera..

Instead of using yeast and such to make the bread rise, there was always a supply of old potato water around, my understanding is that over time the water that was used to boil the potatoes got some similar things in it to yeast, so some of that was added when making the bread..

There's still a few older maori that have camp ovens, they used to bake the bread in the camp ovens in old fashioned bread tins..

I've never managed to get a recipe from any of the maori elders, but if i's made the old fashioned way, rewana bread is really nice, especially if it's been made with kumera water as it gets a bit of a sweet taste to it.. I found after having rewana bread the bread from the shops just wasn't the same, rewana is much nicer in my opinion...