The steady stream of shoppers, each leaving with the new pie, bodes well. One man left with a bag of five! Within half an hour of my arrival, another batch had sold out. A new lot is cooking and Rachael calls out instructions to a friend to head into town for more ingredients. This is a winner, it seems.
After Cyclone Gabrielle Rachael had to lay off staff and now runs the store on her own seven days a week. She is negotiating with Work and Income about wage subsidies, which would enable her to employ new staff.
She prepared well in the week leading up to Gabrielle, noticing a lot of people in the area lacked radios or communication.
“We just opened the doors up,” she said of the days following the cyclone. She clicked into survival mode, with the attitude of “just do what you got to do”.
For nine days that survival mode meant living with no power. Many community members had little cash on hand, prompting Rachael to set up an IOU system which accumulated more than $10,000. Most of this has been paid back. She was grateful for an unexpected donation of $5000 from the Tauawhi Tairā whiti Men’s Centre Gisborne Support from the advocacy group for men’s mental health was a welcome relief.
“I lost all the logging trucks — my main business,” Rachael said.
Then she had a “lightbulb moment.” No stranger to pie-making, Rachael was previously the entrepreneurial owner of Café 35 in Tokomaru Bay and inventor of the café’s famed paua pie. That business became too busy for Rachael so she sold up and bought the store at Te Puia some seven years ago.
Parengo or karengo is edible seaweed, from the same family as the Japanese nori. It grows along New Zealand’s coastline and there are some 35 different varieties.
Rich in nutrients and high in protein it boasts many health benefits and is already a popular delicacy.
Rachael had to be able to secure a good amount of parengo, eventually finding a supplier from the South Island, where “they rake in the parengo, unlike here where they pick it up,” she said. It is a seasonal substance collected mainly in winter and Rachael hopes she has purchased enough to last over the summer months.
“I had some people come from Whakatane to buy a pie — they heard about it on the radio,” she said.
So, what are the secret ingredients to this top-selling pie?
“A lot of butter and a lot of bacon,” Rachael says.
Making the pies is a two-day process but Rachael hopes to work out a quicker technique.
“It’s even got a ring to it, the parengo pie — makes you feel like you’re doing kapa haka,” she laughed.
This reporter was instructed to bring a pie back for her parengo-loving friend. While not a fan of the delicacy, I knew I had to try at least one bite. Let’s just say the friend was lucky there was any pie left to hand over. And the friend’s verdict?
“Awesome — there’s a lot of flavour in that,” said Ra Tautau.
