Most Ghanaian food is eaten with your hands, and that
doesn't sound too difficult until you realize that most Ghanaian food is a soup
or stew. Granted, you get a starchy ball
of something to help you eat the stew, but kind of like eating rice with
chopsticks, it's really hard unless you grew up doing it or have a lot of
practice. I could probably write a 2000
words about the proper way to eat each food, but I won't get into that
now. Just don't eat with your left hand;
it's considered incredibly rude and disrespectful because that's the hand you
wipe with.
Here's another interesting thing about food that I've
noticed: people have the set way of making something and only that specific way
is the proper way. Different families
prepare things differently, and no one quarrels about that, but if an American
tries to add a sauce or vegetables to something that it doesn't belong on, the Ghanaians will let you
know. For example, many of us wanted to
put cabbage on our hamburgers one day (no lettuce so why not) when we had a
caterer, but they insisted that we couldn't do that because the foods weren't
meant to go together.
Starches:
Fufu, bankou/akple, kenke, and rice balls are the four most common starches eaten in
Ghana (or at least Southern Ghana, I'm not sure about the North). Besides rice balls which are just balls of
white rice, the starches are made from some combination of corn, cassava,
plantain, yam, and/or coco yam.
Fufu is made by pounding boiled plantain and cassava
(although yam and coco yam can be substituted) in a giant mortar and pestle
with water. The mortar and pestle is
only used for pounding fufu, and it's bad luck to pound an empty one. The pestle is just a big stick as thick as a
forearm and usually about four or five feet long. The business end is flat because of the
beating it takes, and its edges are all curled back up to keep splinters and
pieces of wood out of the fufu. The mortar
is a big heavy hourglass-shaped piece of wood carved from a single block. They are usually about 16 inches in diameter,
and the part that takes the pounding is flat.
It takes a lot of work to make fufu because you have to pound the
ingredients until you get a sticky ball the consistency of bread dough. Basically you are adding air into the starch
until it's smooth. Also, you don't chew
it, you just swallow the chunck that you "cut" from the ball with
your index and middle fingers. In my
opinion, it's mostly tasteless.
Bankou, also known as akple in the Volta region, is a ball
made by "driving" fermented corn dough together with fermented
cassava. Different regions eat different
strengths of bankou (I don't like it after it ferments for too long), and truth
be told, akple is actually different from bankou, but I don't really know why
yet. You just mix the fermented doughs
together in a big pot over a fire and stir vigorously; this one also takes a
lot of work because you have to cook it for at least 30 minutes stirring
constantly so it doesn't burn. Bankou tastes like a grainy, earthy, sour ball
of corn flour.
Kenke is made by steaming corn dough in corn husks or
sometimes banana leaves; it's a lot like a tamale but it's not filled with
anything. Bankou and fufu are usually
balled up and put directly into the bowl of soup, but kenke is usually served
on the side and dipped into a sauce or thick stew. It's often eaten with "pepe"
(Ghanaians trying to say pepper), and it's pretty similar to salsa. It's also eaten with stewed meats. Kenke doesn't have much flavor either, and
just tastes like corn.
Rice balls are just made by mixing over watered rice until
you get a starchy mass. They are the
easiest thing for me to eat here because we eat rice all the time in America. They think rice is an American food, and I
just find that hilarious because we consider rice to be an Asian food. Rice balls are generally served in the soup
directly like bankou or fufu.
Soups:
All the soups here have the same basic ingredients as
American soups: onions, tomatoes, peppers (the hot ones), pepper powder (think
chili powder), salt (or a processed spice packet made by Magi that is mostly
salt but also has other spices), and water.
By adding tomato paste and a meat (usually smoked and dried fish) to
those basic ingredients you get what they call light soup. It's basically a simple tomato soup, and it
can be eaten with any of the starch balls.
The vegetable soups that I've had are contumiri, okra, and
garden egg (egg plant), and unless you specifically tell them not to, they will
add smoked and dried fish. They all have
less tomato than the light soup, and but otherwise it's the same. Contumiri (I have no idea how to spell it) is
the green leaf of the coco yam, and if you don't boil it for a really long
time, the acid in the leaves won't break down and can cause kidney stones. Also, the older a leaf is the more acid it
has, so many Ghanaians only eat the young leaves that grow from the center of
the plant. Contumiri stew is usually
eaten with boiled yams or coco yams, or occasionally bankou (no fufu though);
it kind of tastes like spinach. Okra
stew it really sticky and slimy because the okra is just boiled and then ground
or diced. Ghanaians insist that okra
stew must have fish in to be okra stew, and it must be served with bankou. Okra stew is not my favorite, but it's not too
bad either. Garden egg is what they call
egg plant over here, and an egg plant is they plant itself. They really do look a lot like eggs here
because they are white not purple and much smaller (you guessed it, egg sized!) The soup had a nice taste of vegetables, and
I think I had it with bankou.
I've also eaten palm nut soup and groundnut soup. Palm nut soup is made by boiling a big pot
full of little red palm nuts, then beating them in a special mortar and pestle
to separate the flesh from the seed. The
flesh is rich and nutty, and it makes a delicious soup full of umami and savory
flavors that I am unable to describe.
It's prepared similar to light soup, but they use red oil (palm oil) to
add more flavor and calories. I like it
best with chicken and fufu. Groundnuts
are peanuts, and the soup is a thick peanut broth that I think goes best with
beef and rice. I'm not sure how it's
made because my host mom hasn't made it for me.
Meats:
I've only been here for about two months and I've already
had a crazy amount of meat variety. I've
eaten fishes of all variety including shark, chicken, beef, pork, snail, snake,
squirrel, rat, cat, and dog. Probably
more too, but that's all I can think of now.
Most have been smoked and dried to preserve the meat (because there are
no refrigerators here) and then added to soups, but occasionally they will be
fried in red oil or stewed. By adding
the meats to soups you greatly improve the soup, but you tend to lose a lot of
the meat flavor and just get a bland smoky flavor. Also, the extra cooking made the squirrel and
rat particularly tough. I haven't had a
steak since I left America, and the beef, chicken, and snail have only been
served in soups. Besides eating fish
with pepe, fish is usually just smoked, dried, and added to soup also. The pork and cat have been two of my
favorites so far. The pork that I had
was cooked on the street and stewed in a giant pot. Because we were eating it late in the day,
they only had fat and skin left, but the fat had been cooking for a long time
and melted into sweet, salty, pork goodness in your mouth. Cat was first fried in red oil and then
stewed in a tomato based sauce with lots of spices. We ate it with kenke, and the meat was
succulent, juicy, and sweet. I've only
eaten dog I've had has been smoked fresh and then added to rice jollaf. It was good, but mostly tasted like smoke.
Up next: Street food, fruit, and everything else!
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