Country 40: Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)

 This was the first meal from Cook The World that I actually shared the cooking experience with. I am fortunate to have a friend, Sophie, who spent nearly a year living in Côte d'Ivoire back in 2011, working with chimpanzees there. She had commented on a few of my recipes from the project and she actually suggested to make moules frites for my Belgium meal, and her family is from there. 

Either way, she very kindly offered to help me with my Côte d'Ivoire meal, saying that it would be an interesting way of trying to remember and hone her cooking skills from when she was living there. Generously, she also did all the grocery shopping for the meal, although said that the African Food Shop in Peckham was her first and only shop. Again, the multiculturalism of London has it's fabulous benefits! 

The problem we had with Côte d'Ivoire is that they are quite reliant on peanuts. Indeed, one of our meals that we made was sauce arachide, a peanut sauce/curry - which was absolutely incredible, but for the benefits of a nut-free blog I have chosen to omit it from this post. Another issue is that the recipes that Sophie were reading from were all in French - while Côte d'Ivoire has 78 different languages spoken within it, French is the official language. Fortunately Sophie can speak French and was able to translate, but I have absolutely no idea what the recipes were and so my perspective of them are only from what I remember. 

Excluding the peanut curry, we also made sauce graine, a palm-nut sauce, as well as attiéké which is fermented cassava and has a consistency and texture like couscous. We also made alocco, fried plantain which is often served as a street food in Côte d'Ivoire. 

The attiéké took ages to cook - we didn't have a steamer, which is what you're supposed to make it in, so we placed the attiéké in a sieve over a giant saucepan of boiling water, with a lid over the time to try and cook the top. Every so often we would tip the attiéké into a bowl, mix it all up and then put it back into the sieve so that we could cook different parts of it at a time. This method actually worked suprisingly well, although it did take quite some time. Once it was all cooked, we served it with some sliced red onion and diced tomatoes, and this formed the base of our meal. According to Sophie, the Ivorians actually form the attiéké into little spoon-like shapes and use it to scoop the sauce up, all in one, instead of using cutlery to eat. Ours didn't hold its shape so well, so while we did try it at first, we almost immediately reverted to using forks.  

Sauce graine is typical made from pounded palm nut, but Sophie was far more to the point and bought it in a can. She was extremely nervous while cooking this one as she didn't think it was going to turn out anything like what she remembered from her time in Côte d'Ivoire, but she was happy with the end result. "It looks exactly like I remembered!" were her words. We added diced onion and tomatoes, the can of palm nut, and another can of water. The can said that we should simmer it for 40 minutes to let it reduce but by this point we were super hungry so we had it on a medium-high temperature to let it reduce quicker. We also added some little yellow aubergines, which Sophie said were the norm in Côte d'Ivoire. I took her word for it! It was good that we did actually because it gave the dish a little more je ne sais quoi. We added some aubergines and also some par-boiled potatoes to the sauce arachide (aforementioned peanut sauce) to bulk that one up as well. 

And finally, the alocco, fried plantain. Chopped up, deep fried, and absolutely incredibly delicious. I do love plantain. 

Voila! Côte d'Ivoire. Bon Appetit!

 Clockwise from top: attiéké (fermented cassava), sauce graine (palm nut sauce), alocco (fried plantain), sauce arachide (peanut sauce).