page_title: Ghanaian cuisine
section_title: Soups and stews
hierarchical_section_title: Ghanaian cuisine / Soups and stews
caption_attribution_description: A Ghanaian delicacy. It is dried tilapia that has been salted.
context_page_description: Ghanaian cuisine is the cuisine of the Ghanaian people. Ghanaian main dishes are organized around a starchy staple food, with which goes a sauce or soup containing a protein source. The main ingredient for the vast majority of soups and stews are tomatoes- canned or fresh tomatoes can be used. As a result, nearly all Ghanaian soups and stews are red or orange in appearance.
context_section_description: Most Ghanaian side dishes are served with a stew, soup or Mako (a spicy condiment made from raw red and green chilies, onions and tomatoes (pepper sauce). Ghanaian stews and soups are quite sophisticated, with liberal and delicate use of exotic ingredients, a wide variety of flavours, spices and textures.
  Vegetables such as palm nuts, peanuts, cocoyam leaves, ayoyo, spinach, wild mushroom, okra, garden eggs (eggplant), tomatoes and various types of pulses are the main ingredients in Ghanaian soups and stews and in the case of pulses, may double as the main protein ingredient.
  Beef, pork, goat, lamb, chicken, smoked turkey, tripe, dried snails, and fried fish are common sources of protein in Ghanaian soups and stews, sometimes mixing different types of meat and occasionally fish into one soup. Soups are served as a main course rather than a starter. It is also common to find smoked meat, fish and seafood in Ghanaian soups and stews.
   They include crab, shrimp, periwinkles, octopus, snails, grubs, duck, offal, and pig's trotters. Also oysters.
  Meat, mushrooms and seafood may be smoked, salted or dried for flavour enhancement and preservation. Salt fish is widely used to flavour fish based stews. Spices such as thyme, garlic, onions, ginger, peppers, curry, basil, nutmeg, sumbala, Tetrapleura tetraptera (prekese) and bay leaf are delicately used to achieve the exotic and spicy flavours that characterizes Ghanaian cuisine.
  Palm oil, coconut oil, shea butter, palm kernel oil and peanut oil are important Ghanaian oils used for cooking or frying and may sometime not be substituted in certain Ghanaian dishes. For example, using palm oil in okro stew, eto, fante fante, red red, egusi stew and mpihu/mpotompoto (similar to Poi). Coconut oil, palm kernel oil and shea butter have lost their popularity for cooking in Ghana due to the introduction of refined oils and negative Ghanaian media adverts targeted at those oils. They are now mostly used in few traditional homes, for soap making and by commercial (street food) food vendors as a cheaper substitute to refined cooking oils.
  Common Ghanaian soups are groundnut soup, light (tomato) soup, kontomire (taro leaves) soup, Palm Nut Soup, ayoyo soup and okra soup.
  Ghanaian tomato stew or gravy is a stew that is often served with rice or waakye. Other vegetable stews are made with kontomire, garden eggs, egusi (pumpkin seeds), spinach, okra, etc.
caption: Koobi is dried tilapia that has been salted
exif: {"Image Model": "GT-N8013", "Image Orientation": "0", "Image Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "Image DateTime": "2013:04:12 09:42:02", "Image LightSource": "Unknown", "Image WhiteBalance": "Auto", "Image MeteringMode": "65535", "Image ImageLength": "1070", "Image FNumber": "268697009/402459650", "Image FocalLength": "343/100", "Image ImageWidth": "1437", "Image Make": "SAMSUNG", "Image ExifOffset": "224", "EXIF JPEGInterchangeFormat": "254", "EXIF JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "0"}