#55 Burkina Faso
- Jen
- Oct 16, 2022
- 3 min read
Back in 2019 when I first had the idea for Jen Cooks The World, one of Mrs S’s first responses was “what on earth are you going to make for Burkina Faso?!”. Well Mum, you’re about to find out!
Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa. It was previously known as Upper Volta and was part of the French Union until 1960. The country was renamed as Burkina Faso in 1984, which means something like “land of the honest men”.
The capital of the Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou, which is really fun to say.
Burkinabè cuisine
The people are known as Burkinabè and food is therefore Burkinabè cuisine.
Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world and food insecurity is a significant issue. The vast majority of the population live in rural areas and are engaged in subsistence agriculture. Key crops are sorghum, millet and maize. Peanuts and vegetables such as potatoes, tomatoes, onions and green leafy vegetables are also cultivated.
In Burkina Faso and its neighbouring countries, sorghum and millet are eaten daily as tô,a polenta-like cake made from sorghum or millet flour, often ground by hand by women. Women in rural areas are also responsible for walking miles to fetch water, collecting firewood and raising the children, as well as often sharing their husband with other women, as Burkina Faso has one of the highest rates of polygyny in the world.
A very similar staple dish made from maize is foufou, which I have discussed several times already in some of my Africa blogs. Tô and foufou are eaten by ripping pieces of tô/foufou off and rolling them into a ball with your hands and dipping them into tomato/pepper/peanut sauces to provide a cheap and filling meal.
Meat is expensive and mutton, goat and beef are usually reserved for special occasions. Poultry farming however, is an important source of income to many, and chicken is an important source of protein in a carbohydrate-heavy diet. Chicken is more common in urban areas and is grilled and sold by street vendors where it’s called poulet bicyclette, so named because the vendors transport it into towns on bicycles.
Babenda is a concoction of stewed greens (spinach, kales, or similar), dried fish and dawadawa. Dawadawa is fermented locust beans which is reported to have a pungent blue cheese-like quality and considered somewhat of a Burkinabè delicacy.
Rice is another important food in the Burkinabè diet, and is often prepared as riz gras, which is French for ‘fat rice’. Riz gras is a jollof rice, variations of which are found across West Africa. Jollof is typically prepared with long-grain rice, tomatoes, spices, and vegetables and/or meat, all cooked together in the same pot. The name ‘fat rice’ comes from the amount of oil used in its cooking, which in the western world, with our privileged obesity crisis, would consider to be an obscene amount. In a country with high levels of malnutrition and food insecurity, anything called ‘fat rice’ is a welcome meal!
Not-so-fat riz gras
I used bare minimum quantities of non- Burkinabè Mediterranean olive oil in the preparation of my riz gras to fry some leek, pepper and chilli. I added some freshly chopped tomatoes and stirred though some non- Burkinabè Mexican chipotle chilli paste before adding basmati rice and French beans, with just enough chicken stock to cook the rice. The Burkinabè would cook pieces of chicken on the bone in the same pot as the rice, but I cooked a skinless, boneless chicken breast separately on this occasion.
Authenticity may have gone out of the window for this dish, but my Burkinabè-inspired riz gras was a solid post-gym feed.
So Mum, now you know what they eat in Burkina Faso. Let’s find out what they eat in…RWANDA!
Comments