Ghanaian cuisine
Waakye
Rice and black-eyed beans cooked with sorghum leaves, which turn it deep red.
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 80 min
- Total
- 100 min
- Difficulty
- Easy
Ingredients
- Black-eyed beans — soaked overnight300 g
- Long-grain rice500 g
- Dried sorghum leaves10 g
- Baking soda1 pinch
- Plantain — ripe, to serve2
- Eggs — boiled, to serve6
- Gari — to serve150 g
- Shito sauce — to serve100 g
- Vegetable oil60 ml
- Saltto taste
Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.
Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.
Method
- 1
Rinse the sorghum leaves and boil them in a litre and a half of water for ten minutes; the water turns deep red.
12 min
- 2
Take the leaves out, add a pinch of soda and the beans and cook forty-five minutes, until nearly done.
47 min
- 3
Rinse the rice until the water runs clear and add it to the pot. The liquid should stand a finger above the rice.
6 min
- 4
Salt it, cover and cook twenty minutes on a low heat without stirring.
22 min
- 5
Take it off the heat, leave it covered ten minutes, then fluff it with a fork.
12 min
- 6
Fry slices of ripe plantain until caramel-coloured.
10 min
- 7
Serve with egg, gari, shito and plantain, all on one plate.
5 min
About the dish
The colour comes from dried sorghum leaves rather than beetroot or spice. They also shift the flavour slightly, adding the earthy note by which waakye is recognised.
The beans go in before the rice: they need an hour, the rice twenty minutes. Otherwise you get either hard beans or collapsed rice.
Waakye is a street breakfast and comes with a whole array: shito, gari, spaghetti, boiled egg, fried plantain. In Ghana the range of accompaniments matters as much as the base.
Worth knowing
- — The soda is for the colour: in an alkaline pot the leaf pigment brightens. More than a pinch and a soapy taste appears.
- — Without sorghum leaves nothing gives that colour. Some use red bean husks, but the result is paler.
- — Shito, the Ghanaian sauce of dried shrimp and chilli, is sold ready-made in African shops. It is salty and very hot, and goes on sparingly.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 560 kcal
- Protein
- 18 g
- Fat
- 12 g
- Carbs
- 96 g
More from Ghana
- Banku with tilapia — Fermented maize and cassava dough worked smooth, with grilled fish and a hot pepper sauce.