Peanut Butter Rice

Peanut butter rice is Zimbabwean everyday cooking, rice finished with peanut butter until each grain is coated, giving a rich, mildly savoury dish eaten as a meal or as a side. Peanut butter, dovi in Shona, is not an occasional ingredient in Zimbabwean food. It is a staple seasoning used the way another cuisine might use cream or coconut milk, stirred into vegetables, greens, chicken and rice. Peanut butter rice, mupunga unedovi, is one of the most common expressions of it, sold by food vendors and restaurants across the country and cooked constantly at home. What separates it from a peanut sauce poured over rice is that the peanut butter goes in during cooking, not after. The rice absorbs it, taking on colour and a faint sheen, and the result is closer to a risotto in texture than to a rice-and-sauce plate. It is deliberately mild. Where West African groundnut cooking often runs hot with chilli, the Zimbabwean version is gentler, and the peanut is the flavour rather than a background to something spicier. Some versions add a little sugar or cayenne to lift it. It is also a practical dish for using up rice cooked the day before, which is much of why it gets made as often as it does.