Waakye


Waakye is a Ghanaian dish of cooked rice and beans, commonly eaten for breakfast or lunch. However, others eat it for supper. The rice and beans, usually black eyed peas or cow beans, are cooked together, along with red dried sorghum leaf sheaths or stalks and kaun. The sorghum leaves and limestone give the dish its characteristic flavor and a red appearance and the sorghum is taken out before consumption. The word waakye is from the Dagbani language, and refer to a particular type of beans. In Hausa, the bean and the dish are called wake, a contracted form of the full name shinkafa da wake which means rice and beans.
Waakye is commonly sold by roadside vendors. It is then commonly wrapped in banana leaf and accompanied by one or more of Wele stew, boiled chicken eggs, garri, shito, vegetable salad of cabbage, onions and tomatoes, spaghetti or fried plantain.

History

It is thought to have originated in northern Ghana among the Mole-Dagbon people. The dish is also common among Hausa settlers in the Zongo communities of southern Ghana. It may be the precursor of the rice and beans dishes commonly found in the Caribbean and South America, brought there through the slave trade.

Ingredients

Waakye is usually prepared by first boiling the beans together with dried millet stalk leaves for the beans to get softer and reddish before adding rice to it on fire.