Fonio couscous with vegetables
Local name : Couscous de fonio
Fonio steamed twice and served with carrots and cabbage stewed in groundnut oil, with olives dropped in at the end.
Photo : Crop Trust · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 45 min
- Total
- 65 min
- Serves
- 4
- Difficulty
- Medium
Method
- Rinse the fonio in three changes of water and drain. Wet it with 150 ml salted water and let it swell for 10 minutes.
- Tip the fonio into the top of a couscoussier and steam for 10 minutes.
- Turn it out into a dish, break the lumps with a fork and pour over 2 tbsp of the oil.
- Heat the rest of the oil in the base of the couscoussier. Cook the onion with the garlic for 5 minutes.
- Add the carrots, cabbage, pepper, salt and water. Bring to a simmer.
- Set the fonio back on top and cook for 20 minutes, with the broth steam rising through the grain.
- Drop the olives into the broth 5 minutes before the end.
- Mound the fonio on a platter, hollow the middle and pile the vegetables in with two ladles of broth.
Steaming twice is what keeps the grains apart, since the fonio soaks first and then dries again in the steam. It is a West African cereal with no gluten that cooks fast and scorches faster. Fine couscous semolina stands in when you cannot find fonio, though it carries wheat.
