Fun fact: Burkina Faso has my favorite capital name. Ouagadougou. It's just so much fun to say! Burkina Faso's Independence Day is in August, so to celebrate I made tô (kind of like fufu) and an okra stew.
To start the stew, onions and garlic are sauteed, then chopped tomatoes (or canned diced tomatoes) are added along with a healthy spoonful of red pepper flakes.
While those ingredients cook down into a tomato sauce, the okra is prepared. I used frozen okra because I already had some in my freezer (for a while--hence all the ice around it) and I've honestly never had to prepare fresh okra. I'm sure it's not difficult--maybe for my next dish with okra that's what I'll do. By the way, this dish is also called gumbo stew because in the languages of western and central Africa, okra is actually called gumbo or similar words (like ki ngombo).
The okra is prepared by simply placing it in a pot of water and boiling it for a few minutes. The reasoning is twofold: first, it helps get some of the sliminess out. I think the main reason many people don't like okra is because of that slimy texture. I don't mind it myself; I love okra. I don't find the texture too far removed from fresh tomato. Second, when making the tô, the cornmeal is actually cooked in the okra water to add flavor.
The okra water is pictured above: it turns slightly brown like a vegetable stock, just much slimier. If you don't like okra, this is not the dish for you.
That okra water is then boiled. Can you tell I didn't really have that many pictures for this post? It's a very simple process and there's only so many pictures I can take of vegetables cooking in a pot.
Cornmeal is then added to that boiling water, and immediately stirred and stirred and stirred to make sure there's no lumps (there were still lumps). I normally use white cornmeal but I had yellow this time. I don't know if it was the different ingredients and flavors or if yellow cornmeal just doesn't cook the same way but it wasn't as good as the times I've made fufu/pap/etc.
Once it's mostly solidified, you take a spoonful and place it in a bowl, and then roll it around and around until it forms a nice ball.
I decided to keep the ball in the middle of the bowl and just place the stew surrounding it to get a bite of tô with each bite of stew. Normally it would be eaten by pinching off a piece and scooping up the stew like you would with a piece of bread. I've found that by using cornmeal, you can't get that super starchy texture like you would with cassava or plantain flour like what's often used. And it doesn't solidify quite as much, so you can't really use it the same way.
Either way, it makes for a filling accompaniment to a stew; more interesting than rice, though less flavorful. But it's not really meant to be flavorful, it's meant to be sustaining!
Recipes Used: Gumbo Stew // Ugali (I couldn't find a tô recipe)
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