Babenda

If you like the taste of blue cheese, dried fish, smoked fish, and bitter vegetables, then Babenda is for you!

Babenda is a popular one-pot dish in Burkina Faso based on bitter vegetables such as spinach, kale, collard greens, or Swiss chard. The thing that makes this dish quite interesting is the addition of fermented grasshopper beans, known as dawadawa or soumbala, which give it a pungent flavor reminiscent of blue cheese.

Soumbala is additionally mashed with smoked or dried fish to add some protein to the dish. The entire recipe is often combined with rice to create babenda, a homogenous mass of bittersweet, soursop, rice, and fish. Dried fish is available in Burkina Faso, including dried sardines and anchovies. They add protein and a rich, rich flavor to foods.

Any bitter green vegetable can be used for Babenda, including spinach, kale, Swiss chard, or mustard greens. Of these, the Swiss chard is the lightest. If you're using a more bitter green (like kale), Burkinabe traditionally adds a dash of potash (or baking soda) to soften the flavor.

Babenda is like a jazz orchestra, creating wild flavor sensations and pungent high notes that linger around suddenly through your mouth.

Ingredients:

450 g spinach
50 g sorrel
2 tbsp peanut oil
1 West Indian pepper (scotch bonnet)
1 vegetable stock cube
50 roasted peanuts
160 g rice (preferably broken)
tsp Salt to taste

Directions:

Wash the sorrel and spinach leaves thoroughly. Pour two tablespoons of peanut oil into the pan and melt the tamarind over low heat while stirring. Once the sorrel is melted, add the spinach leaves and do the same. When the spinach leaves are also melted, add the rice.