Ghanaian Fufood

Now that the sweet taste of cheese burgers and carne asada super burritos has vanished from my mouth, I think it is high time I talk about the agony and the ecstasy of Ghanaian cuisine. Most Ghanaian meals follow a simple 75/25 rule; 75% starch, 25% nutritious, life-sustaining ingredients. Let’s just say, if the Peace Corps didn’t supply us with a daily multivitamin, irreparable damage may be the result of my two years here.

In a nutshell, the majority of the food take just a few different forms and fall into a just a few different categories. In as many variations as you can imagine: plantains, cassava, yam, rice, and maize are boiled, mashed, pounded or all three at once- boiled, mashed, and pounded. Common combinations include: ampesi, boiled plantains and yams; banku, mildly fermented boiled and mashed maize; fufu, plantains and yams boiled then pounded into a substance with a texture similar to chewing gum; kenkey; fermented maize boiled in a plantain leaf (kind of like a tamale but without the excellent center stuffing). Each of these annihilated starchy compounds are then served with either scalding hot soup or stew and, of course, painfully eaten with your hands.

This is my homestay brother and sister preparing fufu.

As for my particular tastes, I like Banku the most, it has a nice taste reminiscent of San Francisco sourdough bread, only hot and gooey. You can’t go wrong with Ampesi dipped in a some sort of stew. Kenkey makes the list and then at the very bottom is Fufu. Despite my initial enthusiasm for it (yeah there was one day where I ate it for lunch and dinner), Fufu has lost my attention, completely. It is by far one of the strangest foods I have experienced. Allow me to explain:

This is the infamous Fufu before it is drowned in boiling hot soup.

First, the taste. If made with some semi-ripe plantains, and cassava it has a nice sweet starchy flavor, but nothing more. Let’s just say it doesn’t add flavor to a meal, just calories. Next, the texture.

It is smooth and sticky, so much so that it is not to chewed, just swallowed. In fact, it is culturally inappropriate to chew your Fufu, not to mention the risk of choking as it sticks to the roof of your mouth semi-permanently. All jokes aside, it has the texture and consistency of chewing gum. A big bowl of chewing gum, with piping hot soup, to swallow.
Not to mention it takes more than an hour of physical labor to make the stuff. I just don’t get it.

And this, is a ready to eat bowl of Fufu, Peanut Soup, and Fish.

To all my future visitors, you better believe this will be your first meal upon arrival in Ghana, and by the time you leave, you’ll be pounding Fufu better than my homestay family.