Ghanaian · Sauce
Shito
- Advanced
- 70 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, a warm current of chile, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 500 ml groundnut oil
- 400 g onions, blended to a paste
- 60 g ginger, blended
- 50 g garlic, blended
- 120 g dried smoked herring, boned and ground
- 80 g dried shrimp, ground
- 100 g ground dried chilli
- 3 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tsp ground cloves
- 1 tbsp ground hwentia (grains of selim)
- 2 tsp salt
The skills inside
Sautéing & the shallow fryFrying the paste until the oil splits
Allergen screen
Found: peanuts · fish · shellfish
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
- Fry the onion, ginger and garlic paste in the oil over medium heat, stirring often, until the loud crackle of boiling water dies to a quiet sizzle and the mass is brown and grainy; 35 to 40 minutes. 40 min
- Stir in the tomato paste and fry until it darkens to rust and clear oil separates at the edges.
- Add the ground herring and shrimp and fry until they smell toasted rather than raw and the paste tightens around the spoon.
- Pull the pot to the lowest heat, stir in the chilli, cloves, hwentia and salt, and cook, stirring constantly, until the whole mass is near black and the oil floats clear on top; about 25 minutes. 25 min
- Cool completely, then pack into dry jars with the oil covering the solids by a finger's width.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Sautéing & the shallow fry 80 recipes
- Everything sits in a single layer with visible space between the pieces: nothing stacked, nothing touching, or the pan is too small for the quantity.
- The pieces move freely and keep moving, sliding across the pan rather than sticking and tearing when the pan is worked.
- Light even browning arrived at quickly: colour on most faces, not the deep crust of a sear and not grey.
- A thin film of fat with the food glossed by it: no pool left in the pan at the end, and nothing greasy on the fingers or the plate.
- Cooked through but still firm, having spent only a few minutes in the pan: anything that has gone soft has been in there too long.
Where it goes wrong Too much went in at once, the pan cooled, and the food released its water: what was meant to brown in three minutes stews for ten and comes out grey, slack and wet.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Albariño
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Shellfish sweetness meets acid, salinity, and bubbles, precision instruments for delicate meat.
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