The table was halfway through polishing off a platter of thieboudienne, a hearty Senegalese one-pot number with fish and rice, when our host Cherif Mbodji asked what home meant to each of us. We all munched silently, considering the question. Someone responded that home was wherever family was; another said it was a sense of security that he carried with him. Though Mbodji himself never answered, I wondered if being here, back in his home country of Senegal after three years away, had spurred this introspection. 

Mbodji and his close friend and business partner, chef Aaron Bludorn, had been talking about someday traveling to Senegal since their days working together at New York City’s Café Boulud, where they met in 2014. Today, the two live with their families in Houston, where they relocated in 2020 to launch Bludorn, a restaurant serving Gulf Coast-inspired fare cooked with French-influenced techniques. As joint partners, chef Bludorn helms the kitchen while Mbodji directs front-of-house and business operations. They followed that restaurant’s acclaim with the seafood-driven Navy Blue in 2022, and a third restaurant is slated to open later this year. Though entrepreneurship has made their lives busier than ever, the duo’s Senegal plans only seemed more paramount the more their business grew: not only was the country responsible for instilling Mbodji’s early notions of hospitality, it was also the original source of countless culinary traditions beloved throughout the South, including their now-home on the Gulf Coast.

That connection became vividly clear as we helped ourselves to more thieboudienne, Senegal’s national dish. Mbodji mentioned how much it reminded him of Gullah red rice, which is common in the Lowcountry and American South. Around the table, flickers of familiarity crystallized into unmistakable recognition. Of course—there were obvious shadows of each dish in the other, from the savory broth that cooks the grains to the sweet acid of the tomatoes. It began to sink in that what we were tasting was the trunk of a family tree. Thieboudienne is also an ancestor of jambalaya, another dish familiar to longtime southerners—including former NFL champions Michael and Martellus Bennett. The brothers were joining us on this trip, having become friendly with the Bludorn team after dining at the restaurant, and the two were curious to learn more about their Senegalese ancestry. “There are a lot of things that we did subliminally that we didn’t understand why we did them,” Michael pondered, reflecting on cooking customs that are commonplace in the Black community. Martellus nodded, adding, “There’s no bridge back to Africa to tell the stories of what happened.”

Though enslaved people played an outsized role in creating countless American staples—from gumbo to hoppin’ John—credit for centuries of culinary innovations has long lagged behind enjoyment of the dishes themselves. After Mbodji arrived in Michigan at age 20 on an academic scholarship, it took him years to realize the undeniable shared DNA between West African and American food. One day in 2006, he was flipping through an Edna Lewis cookbook at Barnes & Noble when he stumbled on a bean fritter recipe, and dormant neurons began firing. “I know this dish,” he recalled realizing: the snack was clearly a cousin of akara, black-eyed pea fritters eaten throughout West Africa. When he relocated his family to Houston to open Bludorn, American cuisine’s West African roots became even more apparent. In gumbo, he tasted evidence of soupou kandja, a Senegalese stew that similarly uses okra as a thickener. “You see okra everywhere here in the summer. It’s one of the ingredients that can grow locally and thrive in the Texas heat,” said Mbodji. “It’s the same thing in Senegal—okra is one of the most abundant ingredients.” 

The origin of these culinary parallels lays bare poignant truths we confronted during a visit to the island of Gorée. A short boat ride off the coastal capital of Dakar, the island was a slave-trading post from where ships carrying enslaved West Africans departed between the 15th and 19th centuries. Gorée has become a pilgrimage destination for people across the African diaspora to both confront and reconcile with the scars and devastation that dark period left on humanity. Our local guide Abdoulaye Mamadou Ba, who has been giving visitors tours of Gorée for almost 20 years, accompanied us around the island and pointed out the stark contrast between the former slaves’ quarters and the opulent homes in which slave traders once lived. While we stood in the House of Slaves memorial, Mbodji told me he had been to Gorée before, and that “coming here doesn’t get easier.” 

The transatlantic slave trade targeted West Africans in large part for their agricultural know-how, culinary historian Adrian Miller, the author of Soul Food, told me later over the phone, noting that it was enslaved people’s knowledge of rice cultivation which jumpstarted the crop’s production in America. In Black Rice, Judith A. Carney writes: “The only people in South Carolina possessing this familiarity were Carolina slaves who originated in the rice region of West Africa,” which included Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. In addition to enslaved peoples’ agrarian expertise, West African ingredients like okra, watermelon, and black-eyed peas also made their way across the Atlantic through the transatlantic slave trade—eventually becoming staple foods throughout the Southern United States.

For many enslaved people, food offered a link back to their homeland. Seeds they planted in personal garden plots allowed them to cook familiar dishes, which they often adapted with available ingredients. Today, the West African roots of staple American dishes are tangible evidence of, as Miller put it, “both the tragedy and triumph” of enslaved people. During our visit to Gorée, Ba told us that, however grim and tragic a symbol it may be, the island is also a reminder of Senegal and Africa’s resilience. “Enslaved people who made it to the Americas fought for their survival—and laid the foundation for future generations of Black Americans.”

In the African diaspora today, food often remains a vehicle for connecting with one’s ancestry. “I feel like I’ve found a part of my history that was missing, with them,” Mbodji told me of the Bennett brothers, as he watched them try foods like grilled thiof, a popular Senegalese grouper dish, for the first time. Introducing his friends to native flavors and seeing them find connection in it fortified their shared lineage. And though their genealogy diverged into different paths, food is a bridge which can always bond the diaspora with their ancestral homeland.

Though Mbodji has now lived in the United States longer than he did in Senegal, his demeanor unwaveringly reflects his native country’s famous hospitality. When we sat down to lunch on Ngor, a small island off the coast of Dakar (and the westernmost point of Africa), Mbodji helped us order enough plates of Burbot fish skewers and grilled thiof to ensure we all got to sample generous portions of the local specialties. He and the server spent several minutes assembling the optimal order, the server’s patient generosity mirroring Mbodji’s.

Senegal’s celebrated hospitality, a deeply rooted cultural notion known as teranga, not only echoes through Mbodji’s personal interactions; it has also profoundly informed his approach to his career in the restaurant industry. “Just knowing what a phenomenal human being he is,” said Bludorn, “I was curious to know more about what part of the world created that. It’s obviously here. Locals welcome you not only into their homes, but also into their hearts. It opens you up, and makes you want to pay that forward.”

The importance of treating people with generosity and decency was instilled in Mbodji early. “My dad used to tell us that there is nothing in our lives that will matter more than people,” he told me later. “Whatever we do, we need to make sure that we are impacting people in a good way.” When he looks back, it’s clear his father’s values planted seeds which led Mbodji to a lifetime in hospitality. While studying business management at Western Michigan University, he found work as a busboy in restaurants, where the energetic environment reminded him of the lively household he’d grown up in. “Whether it’s lunch or dinner, it felt like a party all the time,” he said of his family of 11. “The moment I stepped foot in a restaurant, I knew this is a place that I want to stay.” After graduating, he worked his way up the front-of-house, holding positions at iconic institutions like Michael Mina, the now-closed Bouley, and eventually, Café Boulud.

In the American world of upscale restaurants, most of the food was and still is Eurocentric. That West African culinary influences are rarely displayed and celebrated overtly was a reality Mbodji accepted. One day in 2015, he and Bludorn were grabbing a bite in Harlem’s Little Senegal when Bludorn suggested the two conceptualize some dishes that paid homage to Mbodji’s native country for Café Boulud’s Le Voyage, a rotating menu that explored global cuisines through French techniques. Mbodji couldn’t imagine how the dishes he grew up with could possibly fit into white-tableclothed surroundings. “I could not see the connection of those two worlds,” he recalled. Bludorn, though, was already pulling out a pen and drawing on a napkin. “I could see a light go off in his eyes,” said Mbodji. “He was so excited.” Bludorn quickly sketched a plate that had mafe, a peanut-based stew, on one side and dibi, or skewered grilled meat, on the other—a duo showcasing the flavors and fragrance of Senegalese cooking. Then he drew a reimagined thieboudienne, deconstructed to highlight the individual components of rice, fish, and sauce. A few months later, working alongside Senegalese American chef Pierre Thiam and chef-owner Boulud, Bludorn and Mbodji brought those hand-drawn visions to life.

The project was a gesture of friendship that not only reinforced Mbodji’s pride in his cultural identity, but also opened up an avenue for him to ponder and reframe how he thinks about fine dining in the U.S. “It gave me the courage to continue to have conversations about the connections that exist with West African cuisine, how food travels across borders and connects back to our history,” he reflected. Why shouldn’t Senegalese cuisine be recognized in fine-dining settings more often—served proudly, with dignity and care—particularly when it is so clearly an ancestor to so many American dishes?

Though West African cuisines continue to be underrepresented in the U.S. restaurant scene, particularly in fine dining, chefs of Senegalese origin are working to change that. A national movement of what Miller calls “diasporic dining experiences” examines West Africa’s past and celebrates its present. At Dakar NOLA in New Orleans, chef Serigne Mbaye serves a tasting menu that draws inspiration from Senegalese and Creole fare, producing courses like the “Last Meal,” a black-eyed pea soup that echoes what enslaved Africans were fed ahead of their forced transatlantic journeys. “We have been stepped on, walked over, disrespected. It’s time now to let us have our flowers,” said Mbaye. “My goal is to let people know that West Africa belongs.” Thiam has a similar mission at his African-inspired restaurant Teranga, where the menu teems with homestyle Senegalese fare like ndambe, a hearty and comforting black-eyed pea stew, and yassa poulet, grilled chicken in a tangy caramelized onion sauce. With his food brand Yolélé, Thiam is also connecting farmers in Africa with international markets to spotlight sustainably grown local ingredients like fonio. At Boston’s new Comfort Kitchen, helmed by chef Kwasi Kwaa and managing partner Biplaw Rai, dishes trace the flavors of the African diaspora by way of the international spice trade; the menu features innovative creations like tender jerk roasted duck and smoky za’atar-spiced trout.

As more chefs raise awareness of their heritage cuisines, they are rewriting the narrative of American food—and reclaiming West Africa’s role in creating it. Documentaries like High on the Hog and books like Bryant Terry’s Black Food and Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene are also educating eaters while paying long-overdue homage to the culinary innovations of enslaved people in America. “Eventually, the truth rises,” said Thiam. “It was just a matter of time.” For many Black Americans like the Bennett brothers, interested in researching their family trees and identifying their cultural roots, that time is now.

After we all went our separate ways and returned home to the States, Mbodji and I caught up over the phone. He mentioned that whenever he brings guests to Senegal, the days leading up to the trip are tinged with some apprehension. “It’s difficult to describe what Senegal looks like to someone who’s never been there. I always wonder how people will react—will they be comfortable? Will they understand? Will they connect with it?” This trip, though, reinforced to him that the country has a way of embracing outsiders and emphasizing their commonalities rather than their differences.

To this, I brought up the question he had posed to us back in Dakar: what did home mean to him? He thought for a moment before telling me that, after he and his family moved to Houston, he felt remarkably at ease. The competitiveness of New York City’s high-stakes restaurant scene all but receded into the backdrop in Texas. “The amount of support that people show you, and the genuine love and care that they have for you and your business—they want your business to succeed,” he said of Houstonians, whose neighborliness and community spirit reminded Mbodji of Senegal’s ever-present hospitality. “I don’t know that there’s a better way to make somebody feel at home than that.”

What’s more, for Mbodji, Houston feels like a place where anyone can fit in while still staying connected to their cultural roots. Immigration has made The Bayou City not only the fourth most populated metropolitan in the U.S. but also one of the most diverse—a multiculturality that is reflected in a thriving restaurant scene which embraces global flavors. “It’s a city where I feel that I have a place. I feel that I belong. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s a genuine feeling.”

Though the restaurant is named for its Minneapolis-born chef (which was Mbodji’s suggestion), Bludorn insists that Mbodji’s role in the restaurant runs just as deep. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him,” said Bludorn. “In many ways, he is almost a bigger face of the restaurant than I am today.” On the menu, a crowd favorite is the crab rice that Bludorn cooks in the style of jollof rice, which he learned to make from Mbodji. The chef then smothers the rice in crab étouffée as a nod to the French flavors present in both Senegal and the Gulf Coast. While the rest of the menu changes seasonally, the crab rice always stays—a tribute to Mbodji’s indispensable leadership at the restaurant, and a celebration of West African ancestry in Southern cooking. 

Now, there’s an equally permanent expression of Senegal at Navy Blue: during our trip, the group selected a local fishing boat—painted red, yellow, and green, the colors of the nation’s flag—to ship across the Atlantic back home to Texas. The vessel, now hanging high on the wall behind the bar, is adorned with Mbodji’s late father’s name, Mam Mor.

For those who don’t recognize the vessel’s origins, it could simply be a nod to the restaurant’s emphasis on seafood. To Mbodji, it’s a piece of his old home, now ever-present in his new one.

The post A Journey to West Africa Traces American Food Back to Its Source appeared first on Saveur.

Rise & Dine is a SAVEUR column by Senior Editor Megan Zhang, an aspiring early riser who seeks to explore the culture of mornings and rituals of breakfast around the world.

Cherif Mbodji hands me a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil. We’re in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, and I’d skipped breakfast that morning, which Mbodji seems to have serendipitously anticipated. I tear open the foil to find what the hotel had prepared: a warm baguette enveloping a spread of ndambe—a spicy, hearty stew featuring black-eyed peas, tomatoes, and potatoes—the thick gravy of the dish seeping deliciously into the airy loaf. I bite into the sandwich and savor the earthy flavors. “It’s really delicious,” I tell him, and Mbodji beams. He’s happy to introduce the cuisine of his native country to people unfamiliar with it, he says, and even happier when they enjoy it—especially when the dish is as emblematic of Senegal’s culinary and agricultural heritage as ndambe.

Born and raised in Senegal, Mbodji is director of operations and partner at Houston restaurants Bludorn and the just-opened Navy Blue, both joint ventures with the chef Aaron Bludorn. The longtime friends met while working together at the legendary Café Boulud, and they’re the reason I’m here in Dakar. The business partners had long wanted to visit Senegal together so Bludorn could get to know the place where his close pal had grown up—the place that had instilled Mbodji’s understanding of hospitality (a deeply rooted cultural concept known in Senegal as teranga) and planted the seeds of his appreciation for good food. Now, the trip is finally happening, and I’m tagging along on the journey, learning about the outsized and lasting influences that Senegal’s cooking styles and classic dishes, as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, have had on American food.

Ndambe is one of those quintessential Senegalese dishes. On any given morning, appetizing scents waft from the city’s tangana, casual local eateries dishing out morning staples like eggs, tuna, and frequently, ndambe. The pleasant spice and earthy aroma of the dish, for Mbodji, evokes recollections of childhood and home. “My mom would often make a big batch for dinner,” he tells me. “It’s filling, and you can feed your whole family.” 

I’ve only tasted this dish once before—at The Africa Center in East Harlem, which my friend Omnia Saed once mentioned was home to a fantastic fast-casual eatery owned by Senegalese American chef and cookbook author Pierre Thiam. At Teranga, where diners choose from different dishes to make personalized platters, I peered hungrily through the glass as a server dished a generous scoop of spicy black-eyed pea stew from a cast-iron pot onto my plate. There, it joined a fluffy mound of fonio, an ancient African grain; a helping of kelewele, or roasted plantains; and a ladle of the peanut-based stew mafé. I devoured the warming platter, one of the only times I’ve ever gotten to taste the hearty cuisine of Senegal in the U.S., where the cuisine is still underrepresented. The cozy ndambe, in particular, stuck with me; I told myself I had to try making it at home someday, imagining that, like many stews, the leftovers must taste even better.

Now, in the dish’s country of origin, I learn ndambe does, indeed, make fantastic leftovers. In fact, Mbodji explains, the stew’s tendency to taste better with time is exactly why ndambe, traditionally cooked for dinner, evolved to be served on baguettes for breakfast. Nowadays, countless tangana and street vendors sling ndambe sandwiches for locals hurrying off to work or school. “The whole concept of an ndambe sandwich started from the streets,” says Mbodji, as we head off to explore the capital’s markets. “You can go to the local bakery, buy bread, and they’ll put ndambe inside for you.” (During the Senegal episode of Parts Unknown, the late Anthony Bourdain sits beside a street vendor and enjoys one of these very sandwiches as a morning meal.) Now that the tradition has caught on, families might cook a pot at home to enjoy in the evening, then the next morning, spread what’s left over on some crusty bread and take the sandwich to go. As we walk around browsing artwork and knickknacks, I continue munching on my breakfast. Unlike many sandwiches I’ve eaten that include layers of this and that, this one stays together, the juicy stew acting as a glue between the bread. I can eat it with one hand; it is, for sure, a perfectly portable handheld meal. 

The way this humble bean dish has provided both nourishment and convenience to locals during busy mornings is exactly why Thiam didn’t hesitate to add it to his menu at Teranga—despite the fact that, throughout much of Senegal’s history, the prevalent attitude toward dishes like ndambe was not one of pride. “Ndambe was seen as a ‘country people’ kind of meal, something that was mostly for peasants,” Thiam recalls of his childhood. The labeling of the nutritious, comforting stew as something relegated to the poor is, he believes, one of many lingering effects centuries of French colonization have had on Senegal’s food traditions. “It made us think what came from the French, what came from the West, was the best,” Thiam observes. “We eat baguette bread every day in Senegal, but we don’t grow wheat.” Ndambe, on the other hand, is a Senegalese specialty that proudly spotlights locally grown ingredients like tomatoes, potatoes, and black-eyed peas. The peas have especially symbolic connotations: The ingredient was brought to the U.S. from Africa on slave ships centuries ago, and over time became part of culinary tradition in the Black American diaspora (even becoming associated with New Year’s rituals). For Thiam, ndambe is a dignified representation of his mother country’s culinary and agricultural heritage, and “I want to celebrate that by expressing it through my menu,” he says.

Mbodji says he’s glad Thiam is giving ndambe its due overseas, and that the dish has gained recognition in Dakar and become a tangana and street vendor breakfast staple. In many ways, ndambe sandwiches are a reminder of the resilience of Senegal, which declared its political independence in 1960. Though the marks of French colonization live on in everything from the country’s official language to the prominence of baguettes, locals are increasingly getting reacquainted with the delicious nutritiousness of “foods that grow in our own backyard,” says Thiam. Celebrating that native bounty is exactly why the chef founded his company Yolélé: The food brand is shining a light on West African ingredients like fonio, a low-glycemic, drought-resistant ancient grain, and introducing eaters around the world to the rich cultural heritage from which these ingredients spring. “As more middle-class people celebrate that tradition,” he adds, “ndambe may be something that we see even more often.”

In Senegal, there are as many recipes for ndambe as there are people who make it. Some include okra, while others add meats like lamb, which is Mbodji and his mother Binta Fall’s preference. As I finish up my sandwich, satisfied with the filling breakfast, Mbodji mentions his mother will be making ndambe when she hosts Mbodji and his guests for lunch tomorrow.

“I can’t wait,” he says.

Recipe

Ndambe (Senegalese Lamb and Black-Eyed Pea Stew)

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The post In Senegal, This Hearty Stew Doubles as a Delightful Breakfast Sandwich appeared first on Saveur.

It was partly by using food to teach seventh-graders about the Shoah and trying to communicate the deeper ways to understand loss, memory, and a retained culture that I began to appreciate how much the cuisines of Black and Jewish Diasporas had in common. Civilizations without borders re-create themselves after tragedies and traumas, and they migrate and mutate in response. Just as important, and maybe more important, as what their canons dictate is how their constructs grow and push the culture and its cuisines forward. In particular, the legacies of African Atlantic/African American and Ashkenazi Jewish cultures in the West are important, given the rich dialogue generated by two hundred or so years of common concerns and evolving cooperation and conflict in the United States. Above all is the familiar guest, trauma, and its best friend, want.

Yiddish foodways are extremely beautiful because there are so many similar issues with their cultural interpretation of African American foodways. They even have the same kind of language transmission—the recipes were passed to the next generation in a terse vernacular that bridged ancient homelands and new realities. (Yiddish wasn’t “bad German,” and AAVE [African American Vernacular English, or Ebonics] wasn’t bad English; they were languages born in their place to facilitate specific communal transitions.) In my opinion, people ascribe way too much to ingenuity and poverty; “that’s all they had” gets said, and then a shrug, a look, a dismissal. No, that’s not enough. What does it mean to see these others and how they eat and know what you eat and what you have to have and translate everything in a vernacular born in exile, mixing ideas from all the places you’ve been?

What’s most galling is that we’ve generally missed the mood that looms over both Yiddish food and soul food traditions. They are exploited and extolled for their comfort but demeaned for their lack of health benefits or damned as irrelevant. There is a familiar feeling of shame among some: Yiddish food was pre-Shoah/ Holocaust food, the food of balobostehs (homemakers) and weakened, starving, pious yeshivah boys compared with Newish-Jewish (Israeli-Mediterranean food—the food of the sabra). Soul food was that of ignorant “slaves” fed a diet to match their bonds in other ways, something to keep them in physical chains that did not require shackles. One recent news story spoke of an employee at Ikea who was offended that his manager served watermelon because “the masters gave that to the slaves,” a complete fallacy.

In both cases, the foods of Ashkenazi Jews and Black Americans have been maligned and marginalized right along with the people. If the food was corrupt, so was the beleaguered, antiquated way of life we no longer have a taste for because it embarrasses us. However, these were survivors; they were hyperaware of the seasons, frugal and attentive, and most of all, they used their food to show transgenerational love. The idea that something somehow lacked in their gastronomy or worldview came from without, not from within. When people feel that connection between Jews and Blacks in America, it’s not just in struggle, or in satire or survival; it’s in the very soul of the cooking itself.

When people ask me about my favorite “Jewish” food, I say kasha varnishkes. I understand it. It’s the best of the earth in one bowl. The barley that people saw in fields, the pasta it took G-d and miller and mother to partner in making, and onions—the soul of any soul cuisine, brown and sweet and savory and present—are all in one dish with butter or schmaltz and salt. What more do you need? I see all the people and the feelings they had about their food and their position in life, their pride despite their degradation, and the sense of relief when they got to enjoy just one more thing in life.

As I write this bricolage narrative, it becomes clear that a linear account of Jews and Blacks eating and cooking together or for each other is thorny because we are so often oppressed and marginalized and pushed to the edges. So much is missing, but worse yet, the generations descended from the survivors sometimes do not know how to feel about or comprehend their Ancestors. And yet, our job is to bridge the chasms and feel our way back to a place where we can see beyond imposed lenses that regard us as earth-shatteringly oppositional and then to seek out history. Those accounts, where we find common ground in spirit and purpose, do exist. Food was where these common Ancestors of mine tucked away secrets, hopes, and tactics for overcoming being forgotten and telling a story in which all humans could see themselves reflected.

Excerpted from KOSHERSOUL by Michael Twitty. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, AMISTAD, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2022 by Michael Twitty.

Recipe

Kosher Cachopa

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The post For Cookbook Author Michael Twitty, African and Jewish Diaspora Cuisines Share a Crucial Bond appeared first on Saveur.

Olive trees dig their roots deep into the rich soil in the foothills of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains as teams of harvesters pluck the fruit—just as people here have done for centuries. The mild winters, dry summers, and hot Sahara breeze blow over the coarse sand and rich clay, nurturing exceptionally flavorful olives and producing the high-quality oil used locally to dress mezze like fava beans and fluffy, wood-fired flatbreads.

While Italy, Spain, and Greece have long dominated the international conversation about top-notch olive oil, those countries often relied on Moroccan olives to bolster their own harvests. As the fourth-largest producer of olive oil globally, Morocco has supplied oil to the world with, until recently, little recognition of the quantity and quality of the country’s bounty. 

But in the last decade, the North African nation has more than doubled its percentage of oil exported in bottles rather than sold wholesale, introducing its premium oils to tables around the world. Morocco Gold embodies the very best of Morocco’s extra-virgin olive oil. 

Launched in 2018, Morocco Gold combines centuries of local cultivation and harvesting knowledge with rigorous traceability and quality assurance to bring what many Moroccans consider a “noble food” to health- and flavor-conscious food lovers everywhere. 

Sharing the Flavor of the Foothills

A half-day’s drive northeast of Marrakech, nestled in the early ridges of the Atlas Range, a unique, unspoiled valley in the Beni-Mellal region presents ideal conditions for growing the prized Picholine Marocaine cultivar. Cousin to the more widely known Picholine Languedoc from France, this local variety thrives in the region’s arid climate, dominates the Moroccan olive oil world, and is renowned for its high polyphenol count, oxidative stability, and longevity. 

Morocco Gold’s extra-virgin olive oil is produced using only this cultivar, which imparts a distinctive green fruitiness, hints of sweet almonds, fresh turf, fresh herbs, and a “peppery” finish. It’s this exceptionally well-balanced flavor profile that won the brand a gold medal for taste in the 2018 FoodTalk Awards.

Olive oil is a central ingredient in Moroccan cuisine, and throughout the Mediterranean region, so it’s no surprise that Morocco Gold’s award-winning flavor works perfectly in local specialties like zaalouk salad, lamb tagine, and hummus, all of which offer a taste of this special oil’s culinary roots. 

But it’s not just savory food in which this product shines. SAVEUR’s Editorial Director Kat Craddock likes Morocco Gold’s buttery texture and flavor, which she describes as “peppery, with a hint of grassy bitterness,” and “lovely in both sweet and savory applications.” She recommends using it to roast any of the fall’s finest seasonal ingredients, from winter squash and pumpkins to cabbage and cauliflower to root vegetables. Craddock also finds Morocco Gold to be a natural fit for the pastry kitchen, where it can be used to enhance aromatic pastries like thyme cake with figs and black pepper and even classic sweets like chocolate chip cookies and fudgy brownies.

Picholines and Polyphenols: Great Taste and Reported Health Benefits

For thousands of years, olive oil has basked in its reputation for bestowing strength, youth, and beauty. This reputation was initially based partly on the tremendous resilience and longevity of olive trees themselves: Through the harshest summers and winters, this hardy plant continues to grow strong and bear fruit.

More recently, nutrition experts have increasingly celebrated extra-virgin olive oil for its unique combination of flavor and health benefits. Many of these reported benefits—from improvements in heart health to reduction in diabetes risk—are linked to naturally occurring antioxidant compounds called polyphenols (which are also, incidentally, the source of that distinctive, peppery flavor). Oil produced from the Picholine Marocaine in particular—like Morocco Gold—is especially high in polyphenol levels. Furthermore, the Picholines used by Morocco Gold get an added boost from their unique terroir: The brand’s partner farms are located in the Moroccan countryside, in a valley situated 2,000 feet above sea level. This region’s soil and climate factor into producing a crop of olives exceptionally high in polyphenols, even by Picholine Marocaine standards. 

A co-op of women harvesters pick the olives young and green, when the fruit produces less oil, but one more concentrated in flavor and polyphenols. They use flexible combs to gently remove the fruit into the nets below, never letting the olives come in contact with the ground, which helps keep the quality high. 

From branch to bottle, Morocco Gold takes no shortcuts with provenance or quality control, even printing the analysis of the annual olive harvest on each bottle. Within 24 hours of picking, the olives are inspected, washed, drained, and stripped of leaves, twigs, and debris. During the cold-pressing stage, a metal hammer mill pulverizes the olives; the oil is then separated through the use of a centrifuge, quickly extracting the oil while at its best: As with any agricultural product, the best extraction comes from the freshest ingredients. 

Before the oil even leaves Morocco, it is tested and closely inspected—first by the Office National de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits Alimentaires (ONSSA), then tested again in the U.K. to International Olive Council standards. Throughout this process and straight to the table, Morocco Gold maintains full traceability to guarantee provenance, authenticity, and extra-virgin quality.

Centering Moroccan Olive Oil Expertise and Empowerment

It is believed that olive trees arrived in Morocco with the Phoenicians around the year 1000 BCE, so beginning millennia of tradition woven into the country’s culture and cuisine. Traditional presses called maasras and centuries-old olive trees indicate just how far back the Sanhaja Berbers in the Beni-Mellal have depended on this crop, a long history which has resulted in a community rich in knowledge and expertise. In recent years, olive cultivation in the area has grown considerably, protecting the soil against erosion and playing a key role in providing employment, particularly for women.

Morocco’s agricultural sector employs approximately 40 percent of the nation’s workforce, nearly half of whom are women. Participating in local farming empowers Moroccan women, giving them influence over their household income and expenditures. These jobs reduce poverty at least twice as effectively as other initiatives by both raising household incomes and lowering food costs.

Morocco Gold goes a step further by working with harvesters from the Taytmatine Cooperative, an organization that works to provide local women with business and educational opportunities. The group, which also grows almonds and walnuts, extracts and sells oils locally and regionally. With the revenue earned from these endeavors, many members are able to pay for their children’s education, and to help fund community infrastructure in remote villages, slowing rural depopulation into cities like Fez and Marrakech.

At the end of a busy harvesting day, these growers return home to sip mint tea with their families. They share khobz, a typical round loaf cooked in a wood oven, paired with garlic-scented green and black olives. The ingredients these women use to make traditional dishes like bessara—fava bean soup with olive oil, cumin and paprika—come from nearby, sometimes even their own gardens. Using Morocco Gold olive oil to dress your own salads and mezze, to roast fall vegetables, and to bake your holiday sweets, allows you to tap into that rich and healthful culinary heritage, even from half a world away. 

Find out more at www.Morocco-Gold.com.

The post Morocco Gold: The World’s Finest Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Comes From a Surprising Source appeared first on Saveur.

Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone.

“African art and culture are at the forefront of what we do,” says Priscilla Addison. “We want Ghana to be known for its chocolate, not just its cocoa beans.” Along with her younger sister Kimberly, she founded ‘57 Chocolate in 2016, when they relocated to the capital city of Accra to be closer to their parents. 

“Craft chocolate like ours gives you an experience rather than just something sweet to munch on,” says Kimberly, who left her tempering room still wearing a hairnet to join our overseas video call. “And we’re trying to alter the narrative. There’s been lots of stigma against ‘Made in Africa’ products. We want to change people’s perceptions and prove that high quality can come out of the continent.”

Starting a bean-to-bar chocolate business in Ghana wasn’t the sisters’ original career trajectory. Kimberly, 31, studied French and international relations with a concentration in social justice at Boston College; Priscilla, 33, majored in French and international development, with a focus on food security, at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Both were interested in non-profit sectors addressing women’s education, human trafficking, value chains, and agriculture. But then a visit to one of Switzerland’s largest chocolate factories inspired their venture into confectionery.

“Work brought me to Geneva, where our parents were living at the time,” says Kimberly. “And my dad talked to us about entrepreneurship, and the potentials of going back to our native country.”

“I remember telling him, okay, when you officially retire, we’ll move back to Ghana with you. About two weeks before leaving, a group of friends from church invited me on a chocolate factory tour. Part of the exhibition was a display showing where beans were sourced—Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire—and that was the aha! moment.”

Once they returned to their homeland, the sisters started small. Really small. Roasting raw cacao with a standard kitchen oven in their Accra home. (Craft chocolatiers use the term “cacao” for the unfermented pod and beans, and “cocoa” after the fruit has been processed.)

“At the time, we were using a hairdryer for winnowing,” says Kimberly, referring to the process of removing the outer chaff from the cacao. “Rolling pins for crushing beans. We had our tabletop grinder, and needed a bowl and a spatula for tempering. When it comes to chocolate making it’s kind of like an orchestra: Not one piece of equipment is the most important, because they all do their part.” 

Priscilla chimes in. “And electricity! We were getting up at three in the morning to use the machines because, initially, when we moved to Ghana, the lights would go off quite frequently.” 

Early in the 19^th century, Portuguese colonists introduced cacao, a tropical fruit from the Americas, as a cash crop on the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea, a transit point for ships engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. But it was a Ghanian agriculturalist named Tetteh Quarshie who is credited with bringing the pods to mainland West Africa around 1876. The export of cacao from the Gold Coast began by 1893; today, Ghana and neighboring Côte d’Ivoire produce nearly two-thirds of the global cocoa bean supply, in an industry worth more than $100 billion in annual sales. Most of this crop is dedicated to commodity chocolate: candy bars produced by multinational corporations like Hershey and Mars. While the cacao being raised on small-plot farms in equatorial Ghana usually winds up on supermarket shelves in Europe and North America, many of these growers had never tasted a chocolate bar themselves.

That is, until Kimberly and Priscilla Addison came back.

“Straight from the bat, we went to farmers,” says Kimberly. “Obviously, we hadn’t lived in Ghana for some time, so we explored in the field, and that’s how we started sourcing.”

Priscilla adds, “When Kim and I visit the farms now, we always bring bars of chocolate so that our business partners know what their cocoa is being used for.”

The cacao grown for ’57 Chocolate is interplanted with plantain and coconut trees on two small family farms, each less than three acres, in the Eastern and Western regions. (Hints of coconut are decidedly present when a chunk of the sisters’ dark chocolate melts on your tongue.) The beans are sun-dried and fermented before arriving in Accra. Additional drying takes place at the ’57 Chocolate facility, which now employs 10 people in a larger production space, where the Addisons currently produce about 1,000 bars per week. Kimberly’s favorite is the dark chocolate bar with sea salt; Priscilla’s go-to is milk chocolate with almonds and sea salt, or sometimes the moringa-flavored white chocolate with toasted coconut. They also make bite-size pieces stamped with Adinkra symbols, visual representations of philosophical ideas at the core of life in Ghana. Duafe, a wooden comb, stands for femininity and beauty. Denkyem, the crocodile, represents cleverness. Aya, a fern, means independence; the ’57 in the company’s name refers to the year Ghana became a republic, breaking away from British colonial rule. The Addisons are also in the process of developing their own farm to build a stronger supply chain for Pan-African chocolate.

Knowing where your food comes from is a vital part of educated consumption, especially when it comes to chocolate. A forced-labor suit currently awaiting an opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court alleges two major American food conglomerates—Nestlé USA and Cargill—knowingly aided and abetted human rights violations for profit in the West African cocoa supply chain. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs estimates that up to 1.56 million children may be engaged in hazardous work on cacao farms in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire alone. Some experts believe helping farmers out of poverty is a key part of the solution, and last year the two West African governments established a benchmark premium for cacao futures, intended to increase prices to enable growers to send their children to school rather than work in the fields. Big Chocolate doesn’t like the price hike, but which mass market or artisan candy bar makers want to be accused of child enslavement or other exploitative practices?

Accountability is a core value for the Addisons, along with other bean-to-bar makers practicing sustainable farming and direct trade ethics in Africa. Some include Beyond Good in Uganda and Madagascar, and MonChoco Artisan Chocolatier in Côte d’Ivoire. Kokoa Kamili collaborates with 2,000 small-hold farmers in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania’s Morogoro Region to supply raw organic cacao to international bar makers like Original Beans. 

“When we first arrived, there were a lot of European chocolates in stores here,” says Priscilla. “A lot of people thought those were superior. We want to revive our country’s consciousness of taking natural resources and transforming them into finished products. So that’s exactly what we’re doing with the cacao bean, and we wanted to inspire the youth to continue to do the same.”

One of their most compelling Adinkra chocolates is stamped with the Sankofa bird, its beak arched towards its tail feathers. This imagery is closely associated with the proverb: “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.” (It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.)

Or, for the Addison sisters, returning home to grow the future they envision.

To learn more about the issues surrounding cacao farming, consider viewing the documentary Chocolate of Peace. 

The post Meet the Sisters Making Revolutionary Chocolate in Ghana appeared first on Saveur.

The smell of the morning’s pan-roasted coffee still lingered as a late lunch was hurried up the stairs from the kitchen in hot terra-cotta pots. On the second floor, home of the elegant and matriarchal Senait Worku, in Addis Ababa’s upscale Bole neighborhood, the dining room was set for an Easter feast, Ethiopia’s most anticipated meal of the year. Downstairs, the family kitchen doubles as a production space for their restaurant, Antica.

For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Easter—the most sacred of holidays—also marks the end of the year’s longest and most arduous fast. Adherents rigorously abstain from eating meat, cheese, butter, eggs, and animal fats for not only their 56 days of Lent (known as Hudadi) leading up to this holiday, but some 200 days total each year, including most Wednesdays and Fridays. Such rigorous dietary restrictions have given Ethiopian cuisine an expansive range of tsom megeb—”fasting dishes”—based on vegetables and pulses. From collard greens seasoned with ginger and garlic to earthy beet dishes, chilled lentils with homemade mustard and minced jalapeños, and more, the vivid and distinctively flavored dishes come heaped on a platter-size injera, a lightly sour flatbread.

Made from the fermented batter of teff flour, a tiny ancient grain that’s used commonly in Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine, spongy, tart injera is cooked on a wide, round skillet like an oversize bubbly crêpe that is never flipped. It acts as an edible plate as well as a fork and spoon—­diners customarily use pieces of the bread to scoop up morsels of meat and vegetables, and also to soak up their succulent sauces. Injera is omnipresent on the Ethiopian table, but what’s served atop it changes drastically between fasting and days of breaking fast.

After nearly two months without meat, injera would be the only vegan item present at this family feast. There would be nothing to remind them of the fasting season that just finished. The most important meal of the year’s most important festivity is a celebration filled with meat.

Preparations for Easter begin the day before. At 6 p.m., families, including Senait’s, slaughter a chicken and begin cooking Easter’s reigning dish, doro wat. Twelve precisely cut pieces of chicken are stewed in a sauce laced with berbere, the ubiquitous blend of dried, deep-maroon-red chiles, garlic, onions, and a dozen or so spices such as fenugreek and cardamom. Berbere gives this dish its signature color as well as spicy tang—one that’s not tongue-witheringly hot, but rather layered with nuances of the sauce’s many components.

Senait began the dish by patiently stirring 5 pounds of finely chopped red onions for 90 minutes before adding a single other ingredient. “Many people think of doro wat as a chicken dish, but it’s really an onion one,” said ­Senait’s son, Yohanis, a charismatic 31-year-old who is also a chef, cookbook author, and presenter on a popu­lar culinary travel TV program in the country.

At midnight, with the doro wat off the burner, the faithful went to church, staying up most of the night and returning home to eagerly break the fast at 3 a.m. ­Senait’s husband, Gebreyesus, cut a cross into a thick loaf of difo dabo, a nigella-flecked wheat bread baked in banana leaves, then broke off pieces for the family. They sampled the doro wat but, because it is meant to be the central dish for Easter lunch, had little more than a taste.

At dawn, after just a few hours of sleep, they woke to slaughter a lamb, kicking off what Yohanis called “a day of butchering and feasting.” While butchers do a roaring trade in the region, many families will handle the killing and butchering themselves for special occasions. The feasting began almost immediately with a breakfast of dulet, finely chopped raw stomach, liver, and some sirloin from the freshly butchered animal.

Cuts from the lamb made their way to the kitchen and into pots as the morning passed in cooking—​­chatting, too, as friends stopped by to visit. For guests, there was coffee with thick slices of difo dabo and also murky-golden-hued tej, fermented honey wine that Gebreyesus poured out of small beaker-shaped bottles.

Just before three o’clock that afternoon, the parade of heavy pots began from the kitchen. The restaurant Antica was still open, its kitchen burners sharing the family’s dishes with the restaurant’s orders.

Senait’s daughter Mardet, a hip, 20-something architect, set a wide wicker basket lined with overlapping sheets of injera in the center of the table. Senait began ladling dishes directly onto the injera. She placed the doro wat—into which she had slipped a dozen peeled and burgundy-colored hardboiled eggs, representing the apostles—at the very center. The onions had nearly dissolved to give the sauce a ragged texture, and the flavors had softened but kept their acidity.

Around the doro wat in colorful piles she heaped tibs, small pieces of beef cooked in niter kibbeh (a clarified and spiced butter) with plenty of onions and jalapeños; kikil, a lusty goat stew with garlic, ginger, and turmeric; and a spicy lamb stew glistening red from berbere. There was a fiery, very lightly sautéed dish of beef tongue and tripe, and some fully raw dulet from the morning. Raw meat, such as ox or goat, is a hallmark of festive meals in Ethiopia, and Yohanis arranged generous hunks of marbled tenderloin decoratively on the platter.

Without rushing, the four ate, tearing off pieces of delicate injera with their fingertips and picking up tidbits of stew. The only utensil on the table was a sharp knife, used for cutting pieces of the raw tenderloin. They dipped the pieces into mitmita, an eye-watering ground-spice blend that typically contains a base of dried bird’s-eye chiles, or awaze, a thick sauce made from mixing berbere with tej. Conversation flitted from a building project that Mardet is working on to an upcoming episode Yohanis was shooting in an isolated region of the country.

As soon as the family finished eating, they set down a small round brazier of hot coals on the living room floor. Sitting on a low stool, Senait began pan-roasting green coffee beans in a small skillet over the embers.

The mood was relaxed. Conversation quieted with the shush-shush of shaking beans as the elaborate and ceremonial process for preparing coffee was underway. All attention was drawn to Senait’s hypnotic movements. Frankincense burned in a small dish nearby, its aroma and smoke mingling with those of the gradually darkening coffee beans.

Once the beans had reached a deep, dark-brown roast, ­Senait made a loop through the room with the pan to offer everyone a chance to appreciate the aroma. Late-​­afternoon light streamed through the skylight and illuminated the blue smoke that had gathered at the ceiling.

After grinding the coffee beans—a process typically done by hand—Senait funneled the grounds down the neck of a large, bulbous terra-cotta pot called a jebena, which she placed on the brazier to brew. When the pot gurgled, she removed it from the brazier and allowed the grounds to settle before pouring the coffee into small, handleless demitasses in a single, fluid motion. Nearly as thick as espresso, the hot coffee went down in a couple of loud slurps. There was no dessert—there isn’t even a name for it in Amharic. The cuisine is virtually free of sweets. Instead, with the coffee came popcorn, popped kernels of pearl barley, and more difo dabo.

People would be in and out all afternoon and evening. “It doesn’t really stop,” Yohanis said, as his mother added water to the jebena for the second of three rounds of coffee. “Eating, cooking, talking.”

In a few hours, before appetites had fully recovered, the pots of stew would be reheated and there’d be another meat-laden meal for whoever was hungry.

The post This Epic Meat Feast Is How Ethiopians Celebrate Easter appeared first on Saveur.

The first thing that whets your appetite for suya, Nigeria’s beloved grilled steak skewers, is the scent of smoke rising from the steel-drums-turned-grills, heady with the aroma of spices and charred meat. After 5 P.M. in Lagos, the food scene comes to life with a refreshing zest, especially on Fridays, when everybody heads out to unwind and shake off the stress of the work week.

Lagos is renowned for its state of organised chaos. The largest city in Nigeria—and perhaps in all of Africa—it’s a surging metropolis with one of the world’s most riveting expressions of commerce. The food culture, too, is bustling and vivid, with people always on the move. As such, street food is a staple; many roads and highways in Lagos are littered with hawkers, open-air makeshift stalls, and food carts, which serve hot, spicy, delicacies that are pocket-friendly and affordable.

As the country’s economics hub, there’s a taste for haute cuisine in Lagos. Many cosmopolitan gastropubs are springing up with creative adaptations of local delicacies, offering their own versions of Nigerian dishes with Asian or European influences. But on the streets, there are no frills or fuss: The food is simple and unpretentious.

Among the street foods consumed by Nigerians, suya tops the charts by a landslide. Originally from the northern part of Nigeria, it’s extended its reach to other areas along the coast of West Africa, including to Cameroon to the south (where it’s known as soya or tatum, and is a popular comfort food) and the Republic of Niger to the north. Not unlike the various kebabs of the Middle East, suya starts with thin chunks of meat, usually beef, stuck through with a skewer. They’re then drizzled with groundnut oil and rubbed with a blisteringly hot spice blend called yaji, or suya spice—in which they marinate for three to four hours—before they’re grilled over an open flame. The exact contents of the suya spice blend might vary from vendor to vendor, but it’s always a mix of ground peanuts, ginger, and chiles.

In addition to beef, kidneys, livers, and chicken gizzards are often skewered and grilled too—no part of the livestock is safe. There is also a popular vegan option that features mushrooms for a similar taste and texture. Regardless of the meat, it’s often served with a variety of sides, including freshly sliced onions, tomatoes, diced cabbage, and ground chiles.

The suya vendors in Lagos are often men, and often Hausa men—they’re known as mai suya or mallam, a connoisseur of Nigeria’s suya culture. One of these mai suya is named Ismail, and when I go to pick up my weekly suya fix (a mix of either liver or gizzards with a side of ground chiles) at Glover Court in Lagos’ Ikoyi neighborhood, he is there, as always, in his colorful embroidered kaftan. He’s been selling suya here for almost a decade.

“The suya business is really lucrative in Nigeria,” he says, “especially Lagos, because Nigerians like meat.” There is always a long queue of anxious customers here. The waiting is unavoidable, especially on Friday nights, because the skewers are always grilled to order, then sliced into strips before being wrapped in foil or old newspapers.

As food trends come and go in the restaurants of Lagos, suya will always remain the same—a Friday night treat sold mostly under the cover of darkness, when the city casts off its workday veil. It’s the taste of a city unwinding, of a Lagos draped in neon lights. And it’s always worth the wait.

The post Friday Nights in Lagos Are For Fiery Grilled Suya appeared first on Saveur.

The seemingly endless sprawl of corrugated metal shacks along the highway outside Cape Town is an incongruous destination for a gourmet tasting menu, and it’s hard not to feel a vague sense of discomfort navigating the streets of Khayelitsha, the largest township in the Cape Town area.

South Africa’s townships are living remnants of apartheid; they’re the slums into which non-whites were once segregated. Although the Group Areas Act, which relegated South Africa’s black, Indian, and other mixed-ethnic populations to live within these cut-off communities, was abolished in 1991, Khayelitsha continues to have some of the most crowded and impoverished living conditions in the nation.

But people come here for 4Roomed eKasi Culture, a backyard fine dining restaurant helmed by Abigail Mbalo-Mokoena, a former top six contestant on MasterChef South Africa.

Mbalo-Mokoena’s five-course menu is born of her childhood here, starting with the restaurant’s name. 4Roomed refers to traditional four-room township bungalows typically shared by extended families. “I’m not saying a four-room house like four bedrooms,” says Mbalo-Mokoena, “it was four rooms. At night every room was a bedroom: the kitchen, the lounge. I thought it was normal because we had so much joy. All the cousins, aunts, everyone living in the same household.” Then there are Mbalo-Mokoena’s dishes, modern interpretations of the traditional foods she ate growing up.

“I grew up in apartheid,” says Mbalo-Mokoena, now 41. “In the 80s, things were very rough on the streets. But if you came into our house, you would never know.” Likewise, while half of the population of Khayelitsha falls into Cape Town’s poorest income quintile, the small, tidy house and lovingly-tended backyard at Mbalo-Mokoena’s restaurant belies my expectations for what I’d find inside Khayelitsha. There are whitewashed walls, plants potted in crates hand-painted in shades of teal and violet, vintage Coke bottles filled with wild blooms, and a long, blonde wood table that fills most of the space, set with custom-made napkins embroidered with the words “Taking you down memory lane.” The vintage Bedford truck that she and her husband first started operating out of in 2014 is parked out front.

More than a list of dishes, Mbalo-Mokoena’s menu is the start of a story; as she serves our meal, Mbalo-Mokoena flits in and out of the kitchen, explaining the names she’s given each course. “Native Yards Backyards” is a polenta-like pudding topped with slow-roasted tomato sauce, mixed mushrooms and microherbs picked from the planters around us. It’s also a reference to the backyard vegetable gardens that used to be a key source of nutrition in township diets; once common, these gardens are a tradition that has been lost among younger generations. “Thsisanyama”, a Zulu word for “burnt meat”, is local slang for barbeque; Mbalo-Mokoena grills beef, sausages, lamb, and chicken—caught free-roaming on the township streets—out in front of her house and serves it with homemade chakalaka, a spicy vegetable relish that has been a staple here for generations. Dessert, “The Milk Man”, is a common fermented-milk cheese called amasi. Infused with lemon verbena, Mbalo-Mokoena makes the cheese herself and serves it with fresh fruit and baby toffee apples, a cheeky nod to a burnt sugar mishap that got her eliminated from MasterChef.

“We’re not flying our flag so high with our own cuisine,” Mbalo-Mokoena laments. “We don’t bring it as a unifying thing [between South Africa’s people].” As one example, she cites pap, a maize-based meal that makes an appearance in several courses: with butternut squash, nutmeg, and truffle oil in Native Yards, in spinach croquettes, simmered with coconut cream into thick crumbles and served with citrus and cilantro and rich tomato sauce. But while it was ubiquitous growing up, Mbalo-Mokoena says didn’t realize how common it is outside of townships too. “Pap is a staple you find in South Africa. I wanted to say this township but I’ve been corrected by Afrikaans [white South Africans of Dutch origin]. Every South African eats pap.”

But while promoting cultural cohesion through food is one stated goal, Mbalo-Mokoena’s ambitions run deeper. A dental hygienist for 17 years, she and her educated, upwardly-mobile peers typically fled the township where they grew up once they became adults. But after MasterChef, she returned to Khayelitsha to open her business and to live there. “By moving out of the townships when we got our qualifications and our degrees, we were actually depriving the economy. The kids had no one to look up to,” she says.

Improving food security is another driving force. While most diners come from outside Khayelitsha, Mbalo-Mokoena’s food truck and a second, more casual takeaway restaurant, Mphako/Padkos/Mofao, offer healthy, affordable food for locals. She also works with Harvest of Hope, a community gardening project, to buy township-grown organic vegetables for the restaurant and promote the forgotten gardening skills that once supplied a steady source of fresh produce to the townships.

“Growing up you had everything in the backyard garden,” she says. “Every house had a fruit tree. If you go now, you won’t hardly spot a fruit tree.” But as they say, it starts with a seed. “If you dream about something and say it or write it down, then it happens. Before we did this, we talked it about all the time. I have small [note]books, notes on my computer, my phone. I hope we’re just the beginning.”

The post This Chef is Returning to Her Roots—Literally—With Her South African Restaurant appeared first on Saveur.

Nine years ago, Kobus van der Merwe quit his job at a Cape Town food magazine to help his parents run a casual eatery in Paternoster, a small beachfront town about two hours’ drive north of the capital. Cooking every day and exploring with botanist and horticulturalist friends, he became convinced that the bounty of the region justified something more.

Last year, he opened Wolfgat, a tiny restaurant in a 130-year-old fisherman’s shack. Here, he serves a seven-course menu dependent entirely on the strandveld, an Afrikaans word for where the ocean meets terra firma on the Cape. Together with a staff of six locals. (“There’s no hierarchy here; we all serve, clean, and cook.”) Van der Merwe prepares salt-rich stems and leaves of  bushes in the dunes foraged before dawn, lamb and beans grown just inland, and fish drawn up from the Atlantic.

One morning will bring split-fan kelp, sea lettuce, and spiny urchins plucked from rock pools. On another, van der Merwe brings in samphire, a succulent—“poor man’s asparagus”—that thrives in the driest salt pans. In summer, when some species like sour figs grow in abundance, the team assembles a tidy science lab of pickles.

After the day’s forage is stored, a fisherman arrives on a wooden trawler. The team prepares tjokka, a local squid more often used for bait. Van der Merwe’s signature dish is his simplest: bread served with a pan of sizzling butter in which bokkoms—pieces of salted, sun-dried fish popular in these parts—have been fried.

“We pick only species that grow abundantly and weedily, and take only shoots or leaves, leaving the plant and roots intact,” he says. On a plot nearby, he has begun to ­cultivate much of what he now forages for, with the goal of relieving pressure on the environment. Van der Merwe has a vision of replacing dusty fields of failed foreign crops with strandveld plants that he knows will flourish.

Sustainability is not an abstract concept here. While Cape Town’s drought made headlines last summer, Paternoster, he says, has been dealing with water shortages for much longer. Lining up for water from a truck isn’t a shock anymore. He starts his water-saving efforts each morning by rinsing the sandy, foraged pickings in tide-pool water. Wineglasses aren’t changed, and most courses are eaten by hand, reducing the need to wash silverware. “This has made me more conscious of the way water is used in the restaurant,” he says. “It’s not infinite.”

The post Meals at this South African Restaurant are Foraged in the Dunes of the Cape appeared first on Saveur.

Corlea Fourie, head of viticulture at Bosman Family Vineyards, is examining her vines on the estate’s Wellington property, roughly 45 miles outside Cape Town, South Africa. The once vibrant green leaves have dulled since the start of the harvest in January. Fourie explains that this is due to stress caused by a three-year long drought, the visible effects manifesting on her vines only this year. “My eye is always drawn to the growth point – the little leaves at the end of the shoot. First, the shoots arrived so early. And if they dry and shrivel, as they did, you know something has changed,” she explains of her usually resilient vines.

“At Bosman’s we’re down by a third compared to prior harvests and the berries shriveled quite a bit – what we call oumens gesiggies [old people’s faces] which can be good for concentration, but we need vibrancy and freshness too,” she says. Farm managers and laborers spent countless grueling hours in the sun pruning in anticipation of the dry season, Fourie adds. “We had to harvest earlier and give up some crop. It was during this harvest that I realized I wasn’t in charge anymore.”

Cape Town made headlines in recent months as one of the first major cities in the world to potentially run out of water. This threatens residents’ quality of life and the livelihoods of those working in industries that traditionally require vast amounts of water, such as the hospitality, restaurant, agriculture, and wine sectors. The latter is the ninth largest wine producer globally, according to VinPro, a non-profit representing South Africa’s wine industry.

The city has instructed Capetonians to use less than 50 liters of municipal water per day, restricting usage to only the bare essentials. Day Zero, the day when the city shuts off the taps, has been pushed back indefinitely. Locals were labeled “guinea pigs” for water conservation globally as a result of these concerted, regimented efforts on the part of residents, the municipality, and the various affected industries. According to Fourie and many others, should Day Zero arrive, residents will be given 25 liters of water to use per day, under military supervision, the logistics of which are both dystopian and nightmarish to contemplate.

With major dam levels at 27% compared to 42% last year (as reported by VinPro), the road ahead is uncertain. As the last vineyards tally up their harvests, Francois Viljoen, VinPro’s consultation service manager, says that the industry is expecting the lowest wine grape harvest in more than a decade. Supplementary water granted to the 582 cellars across 10 regions of the Cape has been cut off now, and VinPro’s post-harvest best practice directives covering irrigation, weed, and pest control to restrict water consumption were issued just mid-way through the season. “We are currently in uncharted waters; we have not experienced such a drought in many years,” Viljoen says. The Olifants River region, 124 miles north of Cape Town, bore the brunt of the drought, with vineyards allocated less than 17% of their usual water quota from the Clanwilliam Dam.

Fourie explains that planning and flexibility were crucial to tending to the divergent needs of the Bosman Family Vineyards. “At the Hermon farm, which is reliant on the Berg River scheme, the river ran dry before the red grapes could be harvested,” she says. Unlike Fourie, for whom the signs of drought showed late in the season, Carl van der Merwe, Chief Executive at DeMorgenzon, a family-run estate in Stellenbosch, had a head start. A keen water-skier, he says he’s physically observed dam levels plummet up close, and calls the province’s drier conditions “common knowledge”. Five years ago DeMorgenzon acted on this, planting drought-resistant grape varietals like Grenache Blanc, Grenache Noir, and Chenin Blanc.

At the organic winery Joostenberg Wines, in the southwest Paarl appellation where his vines are 50 percent dry-farmed, owner and winemaker Tyrrel Myburgh says that the irrigation supply was cut off two months before harvest. “Luckily, we managed to irrigate the young and needy vines once. Our yields were down but better than 2016,” he says. He aims to revert completely to the tradition of dry farming established on the farm in the 80s.

Andrea Mullineux is a winemaker and co-owner of Mullineux & Leeu Wines in the Swartland region, which sits 62 miles northeast of Cape Town and is known for its dry climate and dry farming (Mullineux & Leeu boasts a 118-year-old vine that has never been irrigated). For Mullineux, the drought isn’t a new experience. “I grew up in California during some big drought years,” she says. “My son is pretty much the same age I was then; I hope these lessons in water-saving stick with him too.” Gone are the days of running water down the drain to warm it up, she adds.

“The winemakers interviewed go to lengths explaining how every drop is saved or re-used. “Cars go unwashed,covered in layers of dust; water used to boil pasta or prepare vegetables is cooled and used for pets and farm animals,” Mullineux explains. Fourie mentions her cellar’s grey water system: “Now, I can’t think why we didn’t install this sooner. Fixing leaks, measuring water use, planning meetings – it’s meant hours of training our 260 staff members,” she says.

And monitoring and eradicating water-sapping invasive species such as eucalyptus and pine trees is an-ongoing project, Fourie adds. Mullineux says in the Swartland, weed control has become vital: “We mulch under the vines like crazy which suppresses weed growth and helps the soil to retain natural moisture.”

In spite of the loss of volume, Mullineux has praised the quality of her 2018 harvest. “Grapevines are dynamic and auto-adjusting,” she explains, while making clear that the region’s water infrastructure needs an overhaul to better plan for future dry spells. Christo Conradie, manager of VinPro’s cellar division, stresses that lower volumes are a global trend: “Europe’s figures indicate the lowest volumes in almost 45 years. This could present an opportunity to secure sound export agreements for our wineries, with exporters negotiating higher prices with international importers.”

While the region is counting on a winter rainfall, Fourie says that the future lies in embracing technology, like FruitLook, an app she’s currently considering, provided free by the Western Cape Department of Agriculture to farmers to monitor irrigation by satellite and track various measurements. It also calls for a mind shift, Fourie says: “I will never forget this harvest – it’s reminded me that we have a tremendous amount to learn.”

The post Cape Town’s Wine Farms Are Rising Above the Drought appeared first on Saveur.

In Stone Town, a Swahili coastal trading town on the East African island of Zanzibar, locals flock to the stalls for their lunchtime urojo fix starting as early as 10 a.m. Also known as “Zanzibar mix”, the colorful, slightly sour soup consists of a tart mango- and flour-based sauce poured over a dizzying mix of barbecued and boiled meats, fried and fresh vegetables, beans, and sometimes nuts. Street vendors only stay open until midday, when the last drop of bright yellow broth is poured.

A maze of ancient, narrow streets along the Indian Ocean coast, Stone Town was influenced largely by Indian Gujarati traders as early as the 16th century, who carried their culinary comforts with them. The base of the soup, a famous street dish in the region, has a combination of African, Arab, and Indian influences, commonly featuring ingredients like turmeric, and sometimes atta (used in Indian breads like chapati) and gram flour, a dried chickpea flour widely used in Indian cooking.

The original ‘mix’ mounded into the broth was fresh fried kachori (spiced, mashed potato balls), bagia (a crispy, nutty lentil ball), fried muhogo (cassava) shavings, boiled potato cubes, and mayai (eggs). A dash of lime- or cilantro-spiked coconut chutney, some peanuts, and a mango-chile sauce later, the end result is a dizzying burst of crunch, silkiness, tang and spice. While the meat grilling and the ladling of the soup and toppings happens on the street, the wide network of women who prepare urojo will often tackle most of the prep work at home before setting up shop on the street. All of this will run you between 50 cents (USD) and 5 dollars, depending on the complexity of the mix chosen.

Over time, local cooks have of course added flare to their own bowls by piling on additions like grilled meat kabobs, kachumbari (a fresh tomato and onion salad), katlessi (deep fried mashed potato with minced meat), shredded cabbages, cucumbers, carrots, and more. Stone Town vendor Bi. Rihana runs a favorite vegetarian urojo joint from her street-level foyer near the town’s Catholic church. And you’ll now spot vendors who even make alternative broths, using other sweet-tart ingredients like tamarind as a base instead of mango.

Whatever the combination, watching the vendors juggle vats of fryer oil, sizzling skewers, and jugs of neon-colored broth is almost as joyful as it is to slurp back a bowl of your favorite mix. Here are a few places to try urojo:

Kijiko Mtendeni (“Mtende Kitchen”)

Location: Darajani—Zanzibar’s main market
This humble little eatery features communal tables and tender beef kabobs grilling in the back.

Binti Delicious (“Daughter Delicious”)

Location: Forodhani Garden nightly food market
Binti Delicious offers fresh and tasty bowls of urojo served piping hot and enjoyed by the sea, watching the boats float at dusk.

Bi. Rihana’s

Location: across from St. Joseph’s on Cathedral Street (look for the “Welcome to Zanzibar Mix” sign)
Pull up a simple wooden benches and watch the cook fry vegetarian-only delights for her freshly prepared mango broth, served with a dollop of chutney on top.

The post This Mango Soup is Zanzibar’s Lunchtime Obsession appeared first on Saveur.