Catching up on a few old recipes that I have been trying out and had not had any chance to write up. One of those is Zoe Adjonyoh of Zoe's Ghana Kitchen red red; a super spicy stew with unusual ingredient of gari or cassava root that has been grated, and left to ferment. It is then dried and ground to flour. I bought the gari from a local store that specialises in Indian food (the owner is from Kerala) but also sells all sorts of produce from West Africa. Now I managed to find this in a quite big town in the south west of England so I am sure that gari can be found all over the country in the big towns and cities. If you cannot find gari you might be able to find cassava instead and make gari yourself. It turns out you can; found this great step by step guide from Obaapa Kitchen... see below. That is going to be a food adventure for another day.
I had the pleasure of seeing Zoe demonstrate this great dish along with some fried plantain with kelewele spice mix at the Abergavenny food festival. Since then I have been cooking this quite regularly. You can find the recipe for red red on the BBC website. I found that you can be quite fast and loose with the recipe; making it with tinned tomatoes only and using garam masala instead of curry powder (I don't ever have curry powder because I try to use the whole spices instead so making a Ghanaian 'curry' powder has to be my next step). My version was still tasty; if you like hot food you will love this recipe.
Zoe Adjohyoh at Abergavenny Food Festival 2018
Jollof rice, red red stew from Abergavenny food festival (Zoe's Ghana Kitchen)
In the BBC recipe for red red they used vegetable oil instead of palm oil; probably because palm oil has such a bad reputation for destroying habitats. Palm oil is used in much West African food and seems to be a key ingredient for this particular dish. I got the recipe from Zoe Adjonyoh's book Zoe's Ghana Kitchen which suggested using sustainable palm oil or carotene oil ... so if you can use sustainable palm oil or carotene oil then this will make this dish a touch better and live up to it's name.
Most of the ingredients.... with lots of chillies
Sauteing the onion, ginger, chilli in the palm oil and adding the curry and chilli powder
Adding the tomatoes, tomato puree and black eyed beans and cooking for 45 minutes
The final dish of red red with sprinkling of gari on top. Served with basmati rice
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