Fufu fun

“I just sink to the bottom,” a young woman learning to swim at the pool where we go complained to her instructor this morning. “Did you eat fufu?” he asked her rather sternly. 

Our guest David Kechley having soup with fufu. He's good at it!

Partially in answer to Sarah’s question about how you eat soup with your hands, I thought we’d better talk a little more about fufu. Oddly enough, like the woman at the pool, the Ghanaians complain about their staple food. Many of them say it is hard to digest (gives you a sinking feeling?) and they can’t eat it very often. They say if you eat fufu in the morning, you’ll still feel it in the evening. We think it's funny that they criticize something that is also almost sacred.

Fufu is usually made by pounding cassava and plantains (the kind I made with Husseina was from huge yams, which is how they make it in the north). They pound it with a mortar and pestle, the pestle being made of (usually) neem tree branches, and the mortar sometimes small (as in Husseina’s case) and sometimes really huge.

Once the mixture is mashed – into a consistency like chewing gum (Husseina kept telling me, “No, it’s not like chewing gum yet!”), they form it into big balls and plop it on the plate next to your soup. You scoop a big fistful of fufu, dip it in the soup until it sort of absorbs it and is dripping, then quickly get the whole mess into your mouth.

Chewing gum!

As in Uganda, where we experienced this same process with matoke and g-nut sauce, we aren’t very good at eating with our hands. You use only your right hand (for somewhat obvious reasons) and to the Ghanaians it’s just fine that your hand is a greasy, reddish, drippy thing when you are eating your fufu and soup. To us, that is not so fine, we like our dainty forks and such – but those do NOT work with fufu. There is always a bowl of water nearby to wash in, so that helps.

What does it taste like? Hmm, well, it doesn’t have a lot of flavor. It’s more like a vehicle for the soup – someone suggested maybe you could form it into a spoon shape, haven’t tried that yet. Banku, a cousin of fufu but fermented, is treated the same. I like fufu fine – no stomach troubles, but we can’t eat the amounts they do here so that might be the difference. And I really liked the yam fufu. Banku must be an acquired taste, it’s too fermented for me. Kenkey, another cousin, is like banku wrapped in leaves and it has a smokey, charcoal taste. I like kenkey with a good spicy tomato sauce. 

To us, one of the nice things about fufu is the sound of the pounding. It’s a backdrop to everything in Ghana – you hear it everywhere you go and it’s nice. Phoomp, phoomp, phoomp – it echoes off the walls. It has to be made fresh, so someone somewhere is always making fufu! 

Cornelius and his wife are a fufu team

Another interesting thing about fufu is that it is HARD to pound, so lots of times it is pounded by a shirtless man in incredible shape for about 30 minutes or more. A woman generally turns the mortar as it's pounded, which can be dangerous unless they have a rhythm. Maybe this is good for marriages, who knows. Anyway, this is Ghana – you sweat when you move your eyebrow, much less lift a huge stick with chewing gum on the end of it over and over. Sooo, sweat is the seasoning for fufu. (Now do you want some???) Seriously, this is what they say.

The neem branch pestle is a lovely thing, and the first time we saw them leaning against a stand where they were for sale, we couldn’t figure out what the heck they were. They are long and pale, and at one end is a sort of flat, round plate that squashes the vegetable. I’m not sure how they carve them, we’ll have to see somewhere.

So that’s the secret: you eat soup by forming fufu into a scoop and then somehow getting that whole thing to your mouth. And then you sink to the bottom of the pool.