Exploring the Active Volcano of Mauna Loa | National Geographic

(Nature. The most powerful creative force on earth.)

I'm Chef Melissa King. Cooking has taken me to incredible places, from TV competitions and celebrity galas to countries around the world. I'm heading out to places I've never been before to seek out new experiences and to create new dishes inspired by nature. I'm teaming up with some of the world's greatest explorers to go further than I've ever gone before, to push my craft, creativity, and my cooking. This is, "Tasting Wild."

Hawaii. The forces of nature that create this lush and diverse ecosystem are mind-blowing. You can feel the energy and the raw power of the islands the moment you land. I wanna understand where that feeling comes from, take it all in, and tell that story by creating an original dish. That's why I'm meeting National Geographic Explorer, Andres Ruzo.

Andres is a volcanologist who studied here on the Big Island, and he'll be my guide to this remarkable location.

Hello, hello!

• Melissa, I am so glad to finally meet you!

• How are you?

• Great. Welcome to the biggest active volcano, from base to top, on planet Earth. My name is Andres Ruzo. And I'm a National Geographic Explorer, working in geothermal science, conservation, and education. I'm excited to see Hawaii through her eyes, see how she takes this in, and puts her experience on a plate.

• I'm so excited to see what grows out here and just what we can take inspiration from. I've never been on a volcano before.

• One of the best ways, I think, to experience geology is through flavors. There's some things that I think you might like.

• All right. I'm ready for it.

• Let's do it.

How does one become a volcanologist?

• My family grows coffee, and has for the past four generations on the side of the Casita Volcano in Nicaragua, and I would spend my summers on the farm and like, there's hot springs and super heated waters.
• Wow. You grew up on a volcano.
• Pretty much, yeah.
• That's like the coolest thing ever.

I've been to different islands in Hawaii, but this is my first time on the Big Island.

• So what's really crazy about the Big Island in particular is that you have all these amazing ecozones. If you go on the Hilo side, it's much more jungle feel, it's much wetter, it rains a lot more, right? So, right now we're on the Kona side. Even though this looks lush and beautiful, it is much drier than we would be on the eastern side.

• I love discovering the regionality of cuisine and just how different it can be wherever you are. The nuances of flavor-

• Totally.

• Really come from the land and the dirt where that product was grown. So yeah, I'm interested to see what we find, 'cause that's really gonna be the starting point to the dish that I'm creating for you.

• [Andres] This is where the hike begins.

• [Melissa] Let's go!

You could definitely feel the rain and-

• I love it. It's magical.
• So, before they used to rely on water wells and now they're putting in rain encatchment systems to really take advantage of every drop of this stuff.
• Sustainable and-
• Absolutely.

Yeah, it's so important for me as a chef. A lot of my inspiration comes from people that I meet along the way and the flavors that I encounter. There's just so much happening here. All the different colors, and plants that are growing all next to each other. I'm like, having sensory overload.
(Melissa laughs)
Oh, wow.

• [Andres] Right?

• Oh my god. Smell that. Where's the ginger?

• Bingo. Ginger.

• Oh, there we go. It's so incredibly rich here.

• You have rocks being eroded, being degraded, ultimately creating soils. And as a result, I mean, you dig under this mulch and you see this richness in the soil-

• Yeah.

• That's laying the foundation.

• I feel like a kid in a candy store right now. I see passion fruit right there. They're ripe when they fall.

• [Andres] Oh yeah!

• [Melissa] Right there.

• [Andres] Good eye.

• Ah, it's such an intoxicating fruit.

• [Andres] Mm hm.

• Like nasturtiums, but it has a really nice pepperiness to it.

• You can eat this one too?

• You can eat that too, yeah. It's almost like a watercress.

• [plants crunching]

• Yeah.

• There's a little pepperiness to it.

• [Andres] Yeah. This one's-

• And the blossoms you can create like, a vinegar. And so, there's a lot of fun things you can do with this. Are these limes? I feel like every culture uses citrus. It adds some acidity to their dish and brightness. All right, I have so many ingredients here to work with. I think we're ready to go.

• And I wanna take you to the core of the island where all of this magic really starts, so, let's get going. This is a really weird question for you. Have you ever cooked bugs?

• [Melissa] That's the one thing that freaks me out.

• [Andres] Yeah.
  (Melissa laughs)

• We're staying off of bugs today.
  (Andres and Melissa laugh)

The massive scale of this volcano is truly something that I never imagined. I wish everyone could get out and explore spaces like this.

The changes of the weather here are extreme. We went from sunny and tropical terrain, to cold, windy sideways rain, and now we're here above the clouds.

• [Andres] The Big Island is full of diverse microclimates and we've gotten to experience them in a rapid succession on this way up.
• [Melissa] Yeah, it's incredible to experience it all in one drive. I've never driven anywhere like this. It looks like we're on the moon.

Mauna Kea here, from base to top, it's taller than Everest. Mauna Loa, this is-

• [Melissa] Incredible.

• Both of these are active volcanoes. We're looking at beautiful, creative forces, coming in from deep in the earth, forming some of the newest land on planet Earth.

• Well, you can like, feel the energy, the power of this place.
  (Melissa laughs)
  It's beautiful. When was the last time this erupted?

• The last major eruption was 1984. These are living mountains. It's not something that's just eroding away, it's growing, it's active. This is only a small piece of it. The waters around Hawaii between 14 to 18,000 feet deep. What we are on, from here, goes all the way down to those extreme depths, and it's so heavy, it's actually weighing down the sea floor itself. It is one of the most creative and inspiring places on earth.

• There's something here (laughs) that's magnetic.

Get on those mountain bikes. There's a place I really wanna show you just over there. It's called a lava tube. One of my absolute favorite geologic features that you're gonna see on the Big Island, volcanic Disney World sort of thing.

• [Melissa] Like, we have to see it.
• All right.

Since ancient times, Hawaiians have come all the way up here to pay their respects to the mountain.

• [Melissa] For me as a chef, a lot of my inspiration comes from pushing myself as far as I can to create dishes that I never thought I could. I've never mountain biked at such a high elevation, let alone on a volcano. At this altitude, biking across a lava field is not as easy as it looks.

• So the entrance is right down here, so we can stop.

• Stop here.

• Yeah, this is good. So, I think the best path is over here. So check this out. As the lava's flowing down here, you see these ropes.

• Oh, wow.

• It's so hot, it starts melting its way into the earth. You get a trench like this.

• [Melissa] Yeah, like sugar pulling.

• Exactly, sugar pulling, like, viscous stuff. So check this out. It goes down, deep enough to where the top part up here starts to come in on itself, totally closes over, and then it's sealed.

This is incredible.

• Now look down there. There's an entire cave system down here and this is one of the entrances to it.
• Oh my god. (laughs)
• I could go in-
• Oh my god. (laughs)
• And just-
• Be careful.

So I mean, it goes down pretty deep. It's really just a spectacular formation.

• [Melissa] There's like, plants down there, yeah.
• There's these drippings. You see them like, almost like icicles, but of rock. And this is what ultimately built the island.
• [Melissa] This is incredible. Never seen anything like this before.

Time doesn't exist up here. It's so peaceful and quiet.

• [Andres] Now, wait till you see the night sky.
• [Melissa] So, what are we gonna see here?
• [Andres] We'll start to see the Milky Way rise over the next hour.

This moonroof is so cool. I just feel so tiny today.
(Melissa and Andres laughing)
(cymbals glistening)
Andres is taking me to a black sand beach. We're gonna see where the lava goes all the way down to the ocean. I'm really inspired, and I wanna pour some of that creativity into my dish.

I've never been to a black sand beach before, but what makes it that way?

• When you see different color sands on beaches, it all has to do with the minerals. Lava can turn into rock, erode away, and turn into sand grains.
• [Melissa] Beautiful.
• [Andres] I want you to imagine a massive flow of lava, coming down where we were yesterday.

Wow. It's so much more fine here.

• And it's the same rock, so coming up from deep in the earth, coming up with the lavas, it's the same minerals.

• Oh, man.

• You'll even see these lime green, they're called olivine crystals.

• [Melissa] Those are beautiful.

• [Andres] And just over here, you can see where the actual lava flowed into the water itself.

• [Melissa] Trekking across this hardened lava, that originated deep beneath the surface of the planet, makes you feel connected to the earth. And seeing the top of Mauna Loa in the distance where we were last night, you can feel the massive scale of the island, and the full creative force of nature.

• And what's cool, is it's all part of the lava's journey, from deep in the earth to the surface, and the force is so hard that it's getting erosively reworked to start its next chapter in the cycle. And you can really see how the waves are working all of the stones, smoothing everything out.

Thank you so much for sharing this incredible moment with me and all of your knowledge. I'm really excited to just take it all with me and share my gifts with you, so let's go and cook a little bit.

• [Andres] Oh, I can't wait.
• I'm gonna go to the car and grab a few things, but I'll meet you down by the beach.

I really hope that this dish captures just the power and the spirit of this island from the volcano and the farm, and all the beautiful things that we've seen along the way.

• [Andres] Look at that magic happening here. This looks great!

I decided to make a crudo today, that's inspired by the flavors that we've gathered over the past couple days. A crudo is a raw dish, typically seafood with a seasoned broth. It feels like the perfect way to reflect the raw, creative force that I feel on this island.

• I can't wait to taste this.
  (Melissa laughs)
  It sounds amazing.

As a chef, you can't just put food on a plate. It goes deeper down to the story of why. Why am I using that ingredient? We should start with something fresh and bright, and there's so many different colors of the passion fruit from the red to the yellow, and smell that.

• Oh, that smells so good.

And like, the little black seeds kinda remind me of the lava rocks. And passion fruit is one of my favorite fruits on this island. Scoop that right into our crudo liquid. Calamansi, it's almost like a kumquat. And look at this fresh ginger root that we got.

• Oh, yeah, that's-
• I mean, we have to put some of that in there.

While we were exploring, I took some time to cure some local fish here. It's called a nenue fish.

• [Andres] Oh, wow.
• It's a white fish, and I cured it in kombu. This is just some seaweed that we picked up, right in the ocean, cured it just for a few hours.

I think it's so beautiful to see all that like, filtering through you to create this.

• [Melissa] It all comes together when you travel to a new place and experience the colors and the flavors of what's around you.

• So you've never made this before?

• I have never made this before. It's really something that I think is what's great about being a chef, is that every dish can change, so.

• [Andres] So what is that?

• This is pickled shallots. You have to add a little bit of texture when it comes to crudo, and so I pickled them, I sliced 'em, there's some daikon-

• Ooh.

That was just sliced thinly. So I thought adding a few of these sea beans would kind of tie it all together from the volcano to the ocean, and those nasturtiums that we picked up at the farm also add a pepperiness to things. Some lava salt, add a little pop to the dish. Final touch, we're gonna add some heat here. It's a Szechuan chili oil.

• [Andres] Ooh.

• To me, it was inspired by the lava and volcano.

• [Andres] That's such a beautiful color. It really is like that. It's like a liquid sunset. I mean, I love it.
  (Melissa laughs)

• [Melissa] Liquid sunset.

• You've got me so excited to try this.

• And so, that's the dish.
  (Melissa laughs)

• [Andres] Boom. I love it.

All right, let's eat.

• [Andres] This looks great!

• Please have a seat.

• Look at you.

• [Melissa] Here's a little hibiscus tea.
  (Waves crashing)

• Oh, thank you so much for this.

• [Melissa] Yeah, of course.

This is so good.

• Really, my take of everything I saw on the island.

• The colors you brought out, and the pairing of that chili oil with the passion fruit as well?

• That's the Chinese side of me.

• It's a party.

• This place truly inspired a lot of new flavors and techniques. Thank you for that.

• I gotta take you out on more field adventures.
  (Melissa laughs)
  I'm just sad 'cause I finished this.

• I'll get you more, don't worry. Cheers.
  (Melissa laughs)

• Cheers.

This journey on Hawaii's Big Island has been such a gift. It's impossible not to be struck by the magical beauty, massive scale, and creative forces here. I'm grateful for the adventure and inspired by the experience.