Source: APA

Mali to double rice production to curb “high cost of living”

AT/mn/ad/daj/APA 2008-04-18

Quite a number of people have asked me about Malian cuisine. So I have decided to make another category and start posting into it. To kick off here’s an article from Oxfam about cooking in Mali.

Assamhate Wallet Imalahite, cooking sorghum for a mid-day meal

Malian cuisine varies from region to region, but does not offer a great deal of choice. Most meals are based on a kind of porridge with a sauce.

The main foods eaten by a moderately well-off family living in Mali’s capital, Bamako, are rice, millet, sorghum, and beans, cooked as a sort of porridge, served with a meat or fish sauce. A common meal in southern Mali is called tô, a pudding made from pounded millet, served with a sauce of meat or vegetables. In the North, the Songhay and Touareg make thick doughy pancakes served with wild leaves. Tô is also popular in Burkina Faso.

Girls learn to prepare food and cook from their mothers, from an early age. Find out how to make tasty sesame seed and honey sticks, see what a Bamako family sits down to eat for Sunday lunch, and learn about Mali’s tea ceremony.

Read the rest of the article here

 More great pictures from Michael and Doria’s Travel Tales. This article is a great description, with pictures, of the brewing process of a local millet beer. Please take time and look at the rest of this blog!

Homebrew, Bobo Style

In Segou we visited a Bobo family who run a small brewery in their home, making millet beer in small quantities that they sell from a shed in their compound. While Mali is predominantly Muslim, and thus not alcohol-friendly, there are a number of peoples within the country who have maintained their traditional religions. Our guide Oumar referred to the Bobo people as “hard-core animists”. Whatever that means, they certainly were into their beer, and I got quite a few pictures of their backyard brewing venture

Here the millet kernels are soaked in warm water in the sun until they sprout. This, as any self-respecting homebrewer knows, is the first step of the process known as malting. Grains are malted by encouraging them to germinate, or sprout, and then drying them out again before the process goes to far. This increases the sugar known as maltose in the grain.
 

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I really enjoy Malian tea. You see it being brewed everywhere. Here is a great description of the process.

From http://www.moxon.net/mali/tuareg_tea.html

Tuareg Tea

Tea is huge in north Africa, too, where it has assumed a social significance that makes the English habit of taking tea at four o’clock look positively blasé. The north African tea ceremony is well known to be the oil in the cogs of commerce from Morocco to Egypt; it spread along with the Sahara’s nomadic tribes from the Berbers in the northwest to the Tuareg in the Sahara, and if you ever try to buy a carpet in a carpet shop or a pair of slippers in a souq, you’ll be offered tea. It’s an unavoidable part of life in desert Africa.

The Tuareg are particularly into their tea ceremonies, and as you wander through countries where the Tuareg proliferate, such as Mauritania, Niger and Mali, you see people brewing tea everywhere. The process goes a little like this…

• Take your time. If you’re in a rush, then making tea will drive you nuts. Kick back into African time – perhaps by pretending that you’re waiting for a bus to fill up – and slow down your actions. Making Tuareg tea is a ponderous, plodding process, and if you try to rush it, Allah will simply find a way of forcing you to slow down. Relax, take a deep breath, and procrastinate.
• You now need to light your charcoal burner. The best models are made from clay and consist of a shallow bowl with holes in the bottom, supported underneath by a cylindrical column with a large hole in one side. The charcoal sits in the top in the shallow bowl, so the wind can blow through the various holes to keep it red hot; stack some charcoal on the top, slap in some paper impregnated with lighter fuel, and light it up like a barbecue. If you’re in the desert and don’t have a stove, a small wood fire will suffice. There’s normally enough wood in the scrubby Sahel to start a fire; if you’re in the dunes, you’ll have to carry your own fuel.
• Wait for the coals to start glowing, while fanning the stove with a flag-shaped fan made from weaved grass. If you’re feeling efficient you can start preparing the teapot at this stage, but feel free to sit around doing nothing while the fire settles, if you prefer. There’s no rush, after all.
• Once the coals are glowing red, you need to fish out your teapot. This all-metal affair, normally painted blue, is shaped like a normal round teapot, with a long spout, a hinged lid on top and a handle at the opposite side to the spout. Put a heap of tea leaves into the pot, along with a little water, and pop it on the stove, directly onto the coals. The tea you choose depends on who you are; some people, like the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, like mint tea, whereas the Tuareg prefer green tea. It’s up to you, really; you can even brew up a pot of each, if you want. There are no rules.
• Soon enough the water starts to boil and froth out of the teapot’s spout, and this is a sign to start brewing the tea. Fish out up to three glasses, each of them the size of a shot glass and made from thick, colourless glass, and start the concoction process. Pour water into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip this into the pot. Do this three times, put the teapot back on the coals, and if you’re looking for something else to do, rinse the glasses in water, making sure you don’t waste more water than you have to. This is the desert; water is precious.
• It won’t be long before the pot is boiling again, spurting steam out of the spout and quite possibly bubbling around the sides of the lid. Pour white sugar into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip the sugar into the pot. Fill this glass with tea from the pot, starting to pour from a low height and raising the teapot as high as you can before bringing it low again as the glass fills, and take the glass and pour it back into the teapot with a flick of the wrist. Repeat.
• And repeat. And repeat. This part of the process can go on for ages, with some tea pourers pouring and tipping 20 or 30 times to get the tea to the right strength. When you think your tea is ready, leave a little bit in the glass and taste it; if you want your tea to be stronger, or you want it sweeter, then keep on pouring or adding sugar as required.
• If, however, the tea is ready, fill the glasses with the same high-pouring action, so each glass gets a good frothy head on it, and pass them round. You should get three glasses from each pot, and it’s important that they’re all drunk; if there are two of you, pour a glass for your guest, then another one for them, and then one for yourself.
• Drink the tea in short slurping sips. It won’t be too hot to drink, as all the pouring will have cooled it down to a drinkable temperature, and before you know it, it’ll be gone. And then it’s probably time for another pot, if you have time… which you almost certainly do.

And that’s the Tuareg tea ceremony, a routine you see performed everywhere, all the time, from the side of the road to the deck of a pinasse. It’s not so much the tea as the whole ceremony that goes with it; it’s the tea drinkers’ equivalent of rolling your own cigarettes, and it’s just as satisfying.

http://www.moxon.net/mali/tuareg_tea.html

Here’s a recipe from http://www.whats4eats.com/recipes/r_po_pouletyassa.html. I think this is probably my favourite African dish.

Poulet Yassa (Senegalese chicken with onions)

Yield: 4-6 servings

METHOD

Basic Steps: Marinate → Grill or Broil → Sauté → Simmer

1. Mix all the ingredients together in a stainless steel or glass dish. Let marinate at least overnight.
2. Remove the chicken pieces, wipe dry, and grill, broil or sauté them till well browned. Set aside.
3. Heat 2-3 T oil in a large pot over medium heat. Remove the onions from the marinade and sauté for 8-10 minutes till well wilted and starting to brown.
4. Add the rest of the marinade and the browned chicken pieces. Simmer over medium-low heat until cooked through, about 30-40 minutes.
5. Adjust seasoning and serve with rice, fufu or couscous.

VARIATIONS

• Sometimes vegetables are added to the pot to stretch the meat and add more flavor. Add 2-3 chopped carrots, 1/2 head of chopped cabbage or a handful of green olives when you bring the marinade to simmer.
• Half the lemon juice can be replaced with vinegar. Cider vinegar works well.
• Poisson Yassa: Substitute 2-3 lbs firm fish filets for the chicken. Marinating time need only be 1-2 hours in this case. Simmer the marinade without the fish for 10-15 minutes, then add the marinated grilled fish and simmer for 10 minutes more.
• Cubed lamb or mutton may also be substituted.

NOTES

• Poulet Yassa is a famous Senegalese dish that has become popular throughout Western Africa. The long marinating period helps to tenderize the often tough poultry found in region.