Vegetarian recipes from Ghana

Ghanaian cooking without meat works with groundnuts, fermented maize, millet and plantain, using palm oil and groundnut oil as fats and ginger, chilli and onion as the base aromatics. The groundnut is not a garnish but a binder: ground to a paste, it thickens groundnut soup and gives it the richness that cream would provide elsewhere. Fermentation is the other structuring technique: it sours maize and millet doughs before cooking, and it is what gives many staple dishes their recognisable tang.

The day often opens with a porridge rather than bread. Hausa koko, made from fermented millet with ginger and cloves, is drunk thick in the morning, sometimes with fritters. The rest of the time a meal pairs a heavy starch with a soup to dip it in. Plantain stands slightly apart: diced, tossed with ginger and chilli and deep-fried, it becomes kelewele, eaten as a side or on its own in the evening. Heat comes from fresh chillies, measured by hand, not from powder.