#14 Togo
- Jen
- Apr 28, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Overview
Emmanuel Adebayor.
I don’t even know where Togo is. Next to Ghana.
Togo is the poorest country featured in my blog to date. Education is limited, the human rights record isn’t great, and governance is questionable. Coffee, cocoa and cotton make up a significant portion of the country’s exports and it’s also a large producer of phosphate, which is used in medicines and fertilisers. Despite this, the economy is unstable.
Most of the big European dogs have had their paws on Togo (or Togoland) at some point, with the country having gained independence from France (the official language is French) in 1960.
Another notable year for Togo is 2006, where Togo made it to their one and only World Cup finals, scoring one goal, against South Korea (wasn’t even Adebayor who found the back of the net).
Togolese cuisine
Two or three meals a day are eaten, cooked by the women of the household, who usually sit down to do the cooking. A large proportion of calories come from cassava, plantain and beans, and protein sources are mainly fish (freshwater and saltwater) and bushmeat. However, Togo’s favourite thing to eat is definitely maize (corn).
Street food seems to be fairly limited to omelettes, grilled meat and corn.
Fufu (great word) is common and made from pounded plantains. Apparently, the thing to do is to take a piece of the fufu, mould it into a little bowl and use it to transport whatever you’re eating to your mouth.
Riz sauce d’arachide is rice with peanut sauce, that I assume is similar to the g-nut sauce I mentioned in my Uganda post.
Gbomo dessi is a beef and spinach stew. This was a strong contender for my Togolese meal, but the African meals I’ve made to date have tended to be quite sloppy so gbomo dessi didn’t quite make it onto the hit list.
Djenkoume is a cornmeal (like polenta) and tomato “cake”, served as a side dish.
Sauces and pâtés, often made spicy with lots of chillies, usually accompany the aforementioned carbs and can be made with fish, tomato, aubergine or other vegetables.
Togolese WFH lunch
Has anyone else ever had Togolese food for a workday lunch?
I found a recipe for grilled chicken and couldn’t say no. Chicken makes me really happy. Crispy chicken skin with juicy tender meat underneath is the ultimate comfort food and absolutely cannot be substituted or faked. I used to live with this lad who would roast a chicken every weekend but didn’t like the skin, so I got to spend Sunday evenings flaying the entire bird and getting hot chicken fat all over the show. Heaven.
I marinated chicken drumsticks in ginger, garlic and cayenne pepper, and I got to get my ethical red palm oil out again (previously featured in my São Tomé and Príncipe and Cape Verde posts) for an authentic West African flavour! The drumsticks really should have been barbequed, especially as it was a beaut of a day, but I didn’t think I could really justify a workday lunchtime BBQ so the grill had to do.
I served the chicken with djenkoume, which was flavoured similarly to the chicken and also included chopped tomatoes and stock. I made a thick tomato sauce and then made up the polenta in the sauce with some stock.
Garlic, ginger, crispy chicken: what’s not to like? It was simple, no messing around cooking and it was great with an ice-cold Friday beer.
Togo: done.
Next: SEYCHELLES.
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