Ghanaian · Bread
Banku
- Advanced
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, ferment tang with real depth behind it.
Ingredients
- 600 g fermented white maize dough, three days old
- 200 g grated cassava dough
- 900 ml cold water
- 1 tsp salt
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Break both doughs into the cold water and squeeze them through your fingers until no lump larger than a grain survives; the slurry should pour like thin cream.
- Set over medium heat and stir without pause with a flat wooden spatula, scraping base and corners, until the mixture turns from chalk white to glossy and starts to drag on the spoon.
- Drop the heat and keep beating, pressing the paste up the pot wall and folding it back, for 20 minutes; it is ready when it pulls away in one mass and tastes of sour bread rather than raw flour. 20 min
- Beat in the salt, then wet your hands in cold water and mould the hot paste into smooth balls.
- Wrap each ball while it is still hot and eat warm, before the cooling starch sets it rubbery.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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