Food & Drink

Ghanaian cuisine has diverse traditional dishes from each ethnic group, tribe and clan from the north to the south and from the east to west. Generally, most Ghanaian dishes are made up of a starchy portion (such as rice, fufu, banku, tuo, gigi, akplidzii, yekeyeke, etew or ato) and a sauce or soup saturated with fish, snails, meat or mushrooms.

Some of the main starchy dishes include:

• Cooked rice
• Fufu - pounded cassava and plantain or pounded yam and plantian, or pounded cocoyam
• Banku/Akple - cooked fermented corn dough and cassava dough
• Kenkey/Dokono - fermented corn and cassava dough, wrapped in corn or banana leaves and cooked into a consistent solid paste
• Konkote - from dried cassava chips

Most Ghanaian dishes are usually served with a stew (often based on tomato with other protein cooked in it) or soup. The most popular soups are groundnut soup, light soup, and palmnut soup. Okra soup and stew are also popular. Usually rice and kenkey are served with soup or stew, while banku, fufu, akple and konkonte are served with soup.

Another popular dish is kontomire which is mashed up taro (cocoyam) leaves. It is often mixed with bits of tuna and agushie (pumpkin seeds) and dressed with palm oil.

An alternative to the starch and stew combination is Red Red, a very popular and easy to find dish. Red Red is a mashed bean stew served with fried plantains and earns its name from the red spices that tint both the stew and plantains.