National Dish of the Week: Ghana

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 food 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
    * 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

Another popular dish is kontonmire which is mashed up taro (cocoyam) leaves. It is mixed with any protein of one's choice like snails, crabs, beef or fish and sometimes prepared with egusi (pumpkin seeds) and dressed with palm oil.

An alternative to the starch and stew combination is "Red Red", a very popular and easy to find dish. It is made up of a mashed bean stew served with fried plantain. It earns its name from the red spices that tint both the stew and plantain.

Other popular dishes include ampesie (boiled yam and unripe plantain) which is usually accompanied with kontomire, groundnut soup, or nyadowa (garden egg stew) Tilapia, fried whitebait (chinam), smoked fish and crayfish are all common components of Ghanaian dishes. The cornmeal based staples, banku and kenkey are usually accompanied by some form of fried fish (chinam) or grilled tilapia and a very spicy salsa like a condiment made from raw red and green chillies, onions and tomatoes. Banku and tilapia is a very popular combo served in most Ghanaian restaurants.

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 (similar to egg plant) various types of pulses, ginger, garlic, smoked meat and fish, crab, trotters, shrimps octopus and duck all feature in Ghanaian cuisine.