Mumu

The technique first: mumu is cooked entirely underground, with no pot or open flame touching the food — white-hot stones, banana leaves and buried earth do all the work, trapping steam for several hours in a sealed pit that isn’t opened until the meal is ready to share.

History

Mumu is a communal earth-oven cooking technique practiced in Papua New Guinea and much of Melanesia: stones are heated white-hot in a fire, then placed at the bottom of a dug pit, covered with banana leaves, meat, root vegetables, and greens, all buried and left to cook for several hours underground.

Reserved for big community occasions (celebrations, weddings, reconciliations between clans), mumu generally mobilizes several families for its preparation, with the opening of the oven at the end of cooking a much-anticipated collective moment, when the fragrant steam escaping the pit signals that the meal is ready to be shared.

Ingredients — serves 8

• 2 kg (4.4 lb) meat (pork, chicken, or both)
• 2 kg (4.4 lb) root vegetables (sweet potatoes, taro, yams)
• Local greens or cabbage
• Banana leaves
• Stones able to withstand intense heat
• Salt

Mumu, step by step

1. Dig a pit in the ground and light a large fire in it to heat the stones white-hot.
2. Remove the embers and arrange the hot stones at the bottom of the pit.
3. Line the stones with banana leaves, then layer in the meat, root vegetables, and greens.
4. Cover everything with more banana leaves, then refill the pit with earth to trap the heat.
5. Let cook for several hours without opening the pit, for a gentle, continuous steam cooking.
6. Open the pit at the moment of collective sharing and serve the steaming food directly to the gathered guests.

Cooking method

Technique: covered cooking by steam trapped underground, heat diffused by white-hot stones.

Traditional equipment: pit dug into the ground, heat-resistant stones, banana leaves.

Signs of doneness: the meat and root vegetables should be tender all the way through, a sign of sufficiently long cooking underground.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided by eight servings.

Steam cooking underground adds no fat of its own — everything in the 41 g of fat per serving comes from the meat itself, since no oil is used at any stage. The mixed root vegetables (sweet potato, taro, yam) contribute a substantial 10 g of fiber alongside their 64 g of carbohydrate.

Economic context

Papua New Guinea is not covered by the World Bank Food Prices for Nutrition country dataset, so the regional average for East Asia & Pacific is used here instead, as an explicitly labeled estimate. Mumu itself uses ordinary local staples — root vegetables, greens, meat from pigs or chickens raised locally — so its cost lies mainly in the labor and stones needed for the earth oven, not in the ingredients.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. Papua New Guinea is not covered by the country-level dataset; the East Asia & Pacific regional average is shown instead. This figure is not a costing of this specific recipe.

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