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By Marietou BÂ
ABIDJAN, Jan 3, 2024 (AFP) – Within the kitchen of his Abidjan restaurant, Ivory Coast chef Charlie Koffi prepares his nation’s staggering tropical bounty with the strategies of tremendous French delicacies. And he’s removed from alone.
A rising variety of his fellow cooks within the West African nation are retouching native specialities with cooking abilities picked up elsewhere.
Considered one of Koffi’s signature dishes is an adaptation of gouagouassou sauce, a neighborhood specialty.
In his model, a rabbit is stewed with African eggplants, spicy oil, powdered akpi seeds and native fefe pepper.
“It is without doubt one of the dishes I actually liked as a baby,” Koffi informed AFP. “As a chef, it was nearly an obligation to return again to it.”
Koffi was skilled in France earlier than opening his Abidjan restaurant, Villa Alfira, in 2017 to showcase his nation’s delicacies.
Within the well-lit most important eating room overlooking a pond the place fish on the menu swim, Eric Guei tucked right into a gouagouassou casserole.
“I discover style and audacity on this dish,” the completely happy buyer mentioned. “It mixes Western know-how with native flavours.”
Guei loved the copious however fantastically offered meal along with his pal Yasmine Doumbia. “Gouagouassou is a really conventional Ivory Coast dish, and to see it in a restaurant like this can be a actual pleasure,” she mentioned.
Villa Alfira is a change from the “maquis”, typical animated native eateries the place braised chickens and fish are eaten by hand, together with conventional sauces, manioc polenta, and fried plantains.
– Grilled okra and cassava chips –
A number of kilometres away, a chef on the upscale restaurant La Maison Palmier is engaged on her new creation: a taster dish impressed by placali, a typical Ivorian dish made with sticky gumbo sauce, bits of meat and dried fish, accompanied by fermented manioc paste.
Hermence Kadio, who skilled regionally, has her personal a lot lighter tackle the basic. She grilled the gumbo (okra), whereas the cassava is overrated and become chips.
Each week the restaurant’s French head chef Matthieu Gasnier provides amuse-bouche — small bite-sized appetisers — like these to “re-awaken the reminiscences of people that grew up with these dishes”.
About half his clientele is Ivorian, he mentioned.
“Even when our restaurant’s delicacies is meant to be worldwide since we’re in a five-star lodge, I believe it might be unsuitable to not make the most of all these lovely merchandise that encompass us,” he mentioned.
Grains resembling fonio and sorghum develop within the Ivory Coast’s sizzling dry northern savannas, mentioned Koffi, whereas the forested south produces native sorts of spinach and typical tropical merchandise resembling bananas and yams.
– More healthy and tastier –
N’Cho Yapi, who based the group Cooks: Creators of Feelings, mentioned Ivorian cooks started going again to their culinary roots simply after the flip of the century.
Earlier than that, cooks at fancy eating places “had the behavior of providing Western dishes with imported merchandise,” he mentioned. “However the price of dwelling saved going up,” in order that they turned to less-expensive merchandise “that they had slightly below their noses”.
And native specialties are showing increasingly more on the menus of the posh eating places which have mushroomed throughout Abidjan in recent times, Yapi added.
Valerie Rollainth, an Ivorian chef skilled in France on the well-known Institut Paul Bocuse, insisted that sometimes hearty Ivorian delicacies is not suited to the capital’s more and more sedentary way of life.
“There are too few greens, a stunning amount of oil, and the dishes are cooked too lengthy” and lose their vitamins, she mentioned.
On the dietary workshops she organises she urges individuals to eat native merchandise in new methods, resembling uncooked okra, which “is excellent in opposition to diabetes”.
“Some illnesses are linked to consuming habits,” she mentioned. “Within the Ivory Coast, not everybody has entry to well being care, however everybody has entry to wholesome meals.”
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