World Cup Cuisine ? Ghanaian Nkrakra

Ghanaian food is something that we have been planning to try for a while but somehow have never got around to it. One thing in particular that we were keen to try was a peanut soup. But when searching for something to cook for today as Ghana was playing we found Nkrakra, which is a beef and vegetable soup / stew.

This included beef and squash, with the squash cooked with the beef and then taken out, mashed and returned to the pot. It also contained French beans and chopped tomato and was spiced up with dried ginger and chilli. The result was quite similar to what I had expected it would be, but was somehow rather “plain” and felt that it could do with a little more flavour concentration. The simple process of simmering the meat without browning it first and not containing anything like onion, garlic, etc probably contributed to that. However, having said that, I still enjoyed it and felt it was an interesting experiment – always good to try something new and maybe that’s just how it is supposed to taste and doesn’t need to be shoehorned into common European culinary ideals.