Ghana Day 12 032412 Food in Ghana

Ghana Day 12 032412 Food

I don't know that I'm any kind of expert on food, and we've been living with local families in just the south region, but I'll share a few observations. About all that ai do know is that I like to eat, and enjoy spicy things.   I understand that there are some regional tribal dishes that differ throughout the country. There are a few basics.

Some staple foods here are yams, rice, potatoes, tomatoes, casava, beans and corn. These starches form the basis of most dishes, soups and stews. Yams are basically a sweet potato variant, and taste pretty familiar. The main new food that is inexpensive and plentiful here is casava. Casava is basically a white root, and it makes its appearance most often in either a ground, dried powder, or in a thick moist paste, sold in bulk. This has the consistency of bread dough, and one can find huge bowls of it in the (outdoor) marketplace, doled out in bags by the kilogram (2.2 pounds).

The fruits that are in season now are “po-po” (papaya), pineapple and bananas. All are flavorful, juicy and delicious. The bananas are smaller and have greener skins (even when ripe), making me suspicious that the ones in our supermarket are somehow cosmetically altered in some way. In a few months, mangos will be ripe. We experienced a great snack-food fruit, known as “yoy”, that was delicious and a mind-numbing eating process, like shelling peanuts or cracking pistachio shells. Yoy berries grow on a tree, and they are hard brown pods, about the size of a pecan. They are a bit furry and the shells are tender and split open easily. Inside is the fruit, which is has the texture of the fuzz on a ripe peach (but the size of a large raisin). In your mouth, it dissolves with a slightly tart flavor, hinting of raspberry. Apparently, it is one of those 'superfoods', rich in antioxidants, like pomegranate and acai. Inside the fruit is a small, very hard pit, with the texture of dental enamel. Look for it at your local Whole Foods in a year or so once someone discovers it and markets it to an upscale, health conscious market.

The overzealous dairy industry hasn't made inroads in Western Africa yet, so we are spared milk and cheese, for the most part. No “Got Mik” billboards here. I enjoy such stuff in my morning coffee, and the best that I could find is a can of condensed milk, with its characteristic caramel color. There is an ice cream (of sorts) sold frozen in a sealed bag, and consumed (like the “bottled” water) by biting off a corner of the plastic and squeezing it into your mouth like astronaut food. The ingredients reveal that it is also made from condensed milk, sugar and a bunch of oils and such. Tastes pretty good, especially if it is really cold and you are really hot. We had a peak at a small “farm” of around 40 bulls that lived a block or so from our residence home, behind a stockade fence. They were quite thin, and the first reference image that came to my mind was the Bible story of Joseph in Egypt, forecasting years of famine via his dream of 7 lean cattle. Like many people, and most wandering animals, these guys looked pretty hungry. From a different standpoint, these guys were one day going to become a very disappointingly small portion of steak. It is probably best that these folks don't go into the dairy farming business just yet.

Chickens (and their noisy rooster friends) and goats are pretty much everywhere. They do apparently “belong” to individuals, but they roam freely in the roads at all times. More on the broader issues of animals in Ghana later, but chicken and goat products are also a part of the local diet. Chicken is expensive (a whole “broiler”, sold live, is about $15), so it is used more as a garnish than a main dish. Many of the carb-loaded main dishes had a small protein token off to the side, such as a hard boiled egg, or small (buffalo-wing size) drumstick. These were prepared with delicious local spices, but I found them to be more work than meat. We saw chicken and goat, both live and ready to cook, in the marketplace. My antenna was up to avoid local foods, especially raw meat, that had been sitting in the 90 degree sun all day, so I can't comment on how these tasted. They didn't look too appetizing because of the flies, that kind of prismatic green sheen that older meat takes on, and the presentation, often decoratively placed behind a goat head. We'll just have to use our imagination about some things.

There is a local delicacy, known as grass-cutter, that I haven't yet had a chance to try. These are also sold live and one needs to go to a grasscutter farm to purchase them. They are a kind of rodent, rounder than a large rat. Again, it is supposed to be tasty, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to eat this under controlled conditions.

Lots of onions, green peppers and tomatoes in the mix. Lots of cayenne pepper for seasoning. And a ton of bright red palm oil in nearly everything. Palm oil, from my memory, is on the “Most Wanted List” of artery clogging, saturated oils. It is made from pounding and grinding these pretty nuts, about the size of chestnuts). One of our volunteer tasks, at our orphanage/school, is dishwashing, and we've come to despise palm oil because there is no known dtergrent or anionic solvent that we've yet found that really cuts through this stuff. It seems to leave a light residue on everything, not unlike dipping cookware in transmission fluid or gear oil. From that unscientific experience, I'll deduce that this stuff probably isn't that nurturing to blood vessels.

So, the dishes that we've come to love here are rice dishes called Redred and Joloff Rice. The former has onions and peppers and lots of seasoning, the latter is similarly spicy, but has a mild curry base. Redred is a classic dish, always served with companion fried plaintain (which looks like a banana and tastes like a sweet potato). Ghanaians are pretty serious about their deep frying, so these are quite heavy, but delicious in small doses.

Another classic set of local dishes involve a balled up starch, paired with some kind of soup. The starch might be fu-fu, a pounded casava ball, banku, a blend of casava and corn flour, similarly stirred and pounded into submission, or a rice ball (self explanatory). The soups are always spice, heavy on the red palm oil, and usually have some protein like fish or goat. These are “finger-food” dishes, eaten by hand with no silverware. One pinches off a piece of the starch, and dips it into the hot-oil soup, trying to sweep up a morsel of the soup solids on the way to your mouth. It is all swallowed whole, no chewing. Ghanaians like the social part of eating together, and these dishes are sometimes served “family style” with everyone dipping into a common large bowl. We were pleased (like in Israel) to see that hand washing usually prefaced a meal, with the difference being that Israelis wash both hands and Western Africans only wash their right hand, since it is the only one involved in eating.

The food is spicy, delicious and plentiful. For the most part, a real treat!