A 32-year tradition teaches youths about imu cooking

Shaking his head, John Reppun, emeritus executive director of the KEY Project, well recalls the first time he supervised the group’s imu over three decades ago.

His inexperienced volunteers removed all the cooked turkeys from the underground oven and piled them on a plastic tarp at the top of an incline.

They didn’t count on so much turkey juiciness. Or gravity.

So much juice oozed out that all the birds, and all the volunteers, slid downhill, Reppun said. “We found out how slippery turkey juice is.”

Now, 32 years later, Reppun has the art of the imu down to a science and every year he passes on his expertise to as many as 100 volunteers.

On Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving, Reppun will direct the firing up of the imu for his nonprofit — KEY stands for Kualoa-Heeia Ecumenical Youth. They’ll take in a variety of “birds and beasts,” as Reppun puts it, to be cooked overnight underground, and picked up in time for the traditional feast. Tickets for 300 spaces in the imu sold out by the first week of the month.

Several schools and community groups on Oahu sponsor imu events as fundraisers. The KEY Project’s imu proceeds go toward a college scholarship fund named for one of the group’s founders, the late Randy Kalahiki, who worked tirelessly, Reppun said, to “save others from the pitfalls that come against youth” since its inception 50 years ago.

Work on the imu begins weeks before the fire is ever lit. On Oct. 9, youths from the Ko‘olau Baptist Academy were enlisted to move hundreds of rocks and old coals out of last year’s imu pit on the KEY Project campus in Kahaluu, while picking up some fundamentals from Reppun. He began by quizzing the high schoolers: “What kind of cooking are we doing here?”

They guessed: baking? roasting? frying? After Reppun hinted it involved water, one student ventured, “boiling?” but that was shot down with: “No, that would put out the fire.” The students’ youth pastor, Rob Mirasol, laughed and joked: “You can tell they only micro­wave saimin at home!”

Reppun explained that imu cooking (called “kalua” in Hawaiian) entails steaming for several hours, similar to what happens in a slow cooker, with rocks as the heat source. Although it’s often referred to as an underground oven, an imu actually steams the food with moisture from banana stumps and ti leaves, he said.

Foods cooked in an imu emerge juicy, fall-off-the-bone tender, permeated with the earthy smokiness of the natural kindling.

The KEY Project’s first imu pits were dug wider and shorter than they are now. Reppun said the wider pits meant the workers had to climb over a lot of rocks to get to the center, and that made it harder to pass the food in and out. Today’s long and narrow pit — 35 by 5 feet — is much easier to work from, he said.

The rocks that the students removed will be returned to the imu next week along with fresh layers of wooden pallets; mango, kiawe and mangrove branches and logs; banana stumps and old newspapers, all laid down in a certain order. Then the fire will be lit — “that’s our smoke signal to the world that the imu is on,” Reppun said — shooting a thick plume of smoke 50 feet into the air. It will burn for more than five hours, till about 6:30 p.m.

Once the fire has burned down and the rocks are red-hot, another layer of sliced and shredded banana stumps will be added to provide moisture, then a layer of banana leaves (called hali‘i), on which the packages of food will sit. The pit will then be covered with more banana and ti leaves, a layer of wet burlap bags and dropcloths. Finally, a couple sheets of heavy plastic will cover the imu, sealing the pit to starve the fire of oxygen.

As the steam does its job, the imu becomes “a slow cooker left overnight and opened on Thanksgiving morning,” Reppun said.

The most gratifying thing he sees is the sense of community that develops when families bring their dinners to the imu.

Each year, more than 100 volunteers and patrons “come at it with a joy you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “ It’s just wonderful to see how people jump in to cook together as a community.”

How to build an imu by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd