Taste Ghana
Ghana
A coastal West African country whose cooking runs on plantain, cassava, peanuts, palm oil and a confident hand with chilli and ginger.
Ghanaian food pairs a starch with a soup or stew. The starches are fufu (pounded cassava and plantain), banku and kenkey (fermented maize), rice balls and boiled yam. The soups are light soup, groundnut soup and palm nut soup; the stews are tomato-based, often with smoked fish or goat. Jollof is cooked with more tomato and ginger than the Nigerian pot and defended just as fiercely. Street food is strong: waakye in the morning, kelewele at night, red-red at lunch, kebabs (chichinga) at the roadside. Shito, a black pepper and dried fish sauce, goes on everything.
4 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 4
- 1 hr 20 min
Waakye
Ghanaian rice and beans cooked together with dried sorghum leaves, which turn the pot red-brown, sold by the ladle from street tables.
Easy
- 30 min
Kelewele
Ghanaian fried ripe plantain cubes tossed in ginger, chilli and onion before they hit the oil — sweet, hot, sticky-edged street food.
Very easyMedium heat
- 1 hr 35 min
Red-red
Ghanaian black-eyed bean stew cooked in red palm oil with tomato and ginger, served with fried ripe plantain.
EasyMedium heat
- 1 hr 30 min
Groundnut soup
Nkatenkwan
Ghanaian peanut soup with chicken, tomato, ginger and chilli, thin enough to call soup and eaten with rice balls or fufu.
EasyMedium heat
Regional cuisines
Think you know Ghana food?
3 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the Ghana food quizFood history
The Akan, Ga, Ewe and northern peoples each brought their own staples: yam and plantain in the forest, millet and sorghum in the savannah, fish on the coast. Portuguese contact from 1471 introduced maize, cassava and chilli, which reshaped the whole table. The Atlantic slave trade and later British Gold Coast colony added tinned goods and wheat bread. Hausa migration brought waakye and kebabs south. Since independence in 1957, Accra has become a food city and the Ghanaian diaspora has made jollof, kelewele and shito familiar in London and New York.
Common ingredients
Techniques
- pounding fufu
- fermenting maize dough
- frying plantain
- blending tomato-ginger bases
- smoking fish
- simmering groundnut soups