Recettes

Ghanaian Chale Sauce

This is a blended tomato, onion and chilli sauce in the West African style, cooked down in oil and finished with a spice blend, and it is presented here as it appeared in the source archive. It is used as a dip for fried plantain and grilled meat and as a marinade for chicken or fish. The name needs care. Chale is Ghanaian pidgin, an address between friends roughly equivalent to mate or bro, and it appears in Ghanaian food naming most familiarly in chale wote, the flip flop sandal that gives its name to the Accra street art festival. It is not, on the available record, an established name for a documented Ghanaian sauce, and this may be a contemporary or house name rather than a traditional one. Ghana's documented pepper sauces are shito, the dark fermented sauce of dried fish, prawn and pepper, and the fresh pepper sauces made with tomato, onion and chilli that accompany kelewele and grilled tilapia. This recipe sits closer to the second group, though the nutmeg and curry powder in its spice list are not characteristic of either. It is included as found, and flagged so the naming can be checked before it goes live.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 10 minEasyGhana

Recette de Laila · Africook

Farofa (Toasted Cassava Flour)

Farofa is cassava flour toasted in fat with onion, garlic and usually bacon, until it turns golden and sandy. It is Brazilian, and it appears on the table at almost every Brazilian meal that involves a stew or grilled meat. Its job is texture. Brazilian cooking produces a great deal of rich, soupy food, feijoada above all, and farofa is scattered over it to absorb the liquid and give a dry, crunchy contrast. Eaten on its own it makes little sense; eaten over a wet dish it makes complete sense, and that is how it is used. The African connection is direct and worth stating. Cassava is South American in origin, but the technique of toasting cassava meal into a dry accompaniment moved across the Atlantic in both directions with the transatlantic slave trade, and farofa's closest relatives are West African. Garri, the fermented and toasted cassava granules eaten across Nigeria, Ghana and Benin, is made by essentially the same process. Brazilian cooking, and Bahian cooking in particular, carries an enormous amount of West African influence, and farofa sits squarely in that history, which is precisely why it belongs in a Worldwide collection on an African food site rather than being simply foreign. The method is short and the one instruction that matters is to keep it moving. Cassava flour burns quickly and unevenly.

15 minEasy

Recette de Nympha · Africook