Cookbook:Cuisine of Ghana

Cookbook | Ingredients | Cuisines

Fufu with peanut soup and meat

Ghanaian cuisine has diverse traditional dishes from each ethnic group, tribe and clan from the north to the south and from the east to west. Generally, most Ghanaian foods are made up of a starchy portion (rice, fufu, banku, tuozafi, gigi, akplidzii, yekeyeke, etew, ato, etc) and a sauce or soup saturated with fish, snails, meat or mushrooms.

Some of the main starchy dishes are:

• Cooked plain rice with stew
• Jollof rice
• Waakye - rice and beans
• Fufu - pounded cassava and plantain or pounded yam and plantain, or pounded cocoyam
• Banku/Akple - cooked fermented corn dough and cassava dough
• Kenkey/Dokonu - fermented corn dough, wrapped in corn or plantain leaves and cooked into a consistent solid balls
• Kokonte - from dried cassava made into powder
• Garri|Gari - made from cassava
• Omo Tuo - pounded rice staple of northern origins.

Most Ghanaian dishes are usually served with a stew (often based on tomato with other protein cooked in it) or soup. The most popular soups are groundnut soup, light soup, and palmnut soup. Okra soup and stew are also popular. Usually rice is served with a soup or stew, kenkey is served with fried fish and hot pepper while banku is usually served with okra stew or soup and occasionally with tilapia. Fufu, akple and konkonte are served with soup.

A popular side dish in Ghana is kelewele. It is sometimes served with groundnuts, and sometimes eaten alone as a starter. Chinchinga or Kebabs are also very popular.

Ghanaian food is quite sophisticated with liberal and adventurous use of exotic ingredients and a wide variety of tastes, spices and textures. Herbs such as thyme, bay leaf, vegetables such as wild mushrooms, garden eggs, various types of pulses, ginger, garlic, smoked meat and fish, crab, trotters, shrimps octopus and duck all feature in Ghanaian cuisine.

External links

• Ghanaian food on Ghanaweb.com