1st Dish Poulet Nyembwe from Gabon!

Right, so it’s took a little longer than I expected but finally I’ve started my second 30 day challenge!

As I’ve mentioned previously my challenge is to cook 30 different recipes from 30 different countries in 30 days.

So Day one was yesterday 24^th Feb 2012, and the first country on my list was Gabon. (No, I’d never heard of it either before I started this challenge).

When I initially decided on this challenge I thought it’d be quite easy to find recipes from various countries around the world. What with Google and an instant access to gazillions of websites, I thought all I needed to do was simply simple search on Google and hey-presto up would pop the relevant website and off I’d go. Alas it wasn't that simple, I searched for days to find recipes for Gabon and all I could find were about three!. Luckily for me the dish I finally decided to cook turned out to be their national dish, my only hope is that my version resembles theirs.

All the ingredients are pretty easy to find apart from Nyembwe Sauce. I had no idea what this was, nor how it tasted, or even what it looked like. My first port of call was Wikipedia to see if this font of knowledge could tell me. When you type in Nyembwe it automatically directs you to Moambe, and here is what it says about Moambe; “Moambe, mwambe, Nyembwe, palm butter, or palm cream is the name of a sauce or a dish prepared with a sauce usually made from the pericarp (not the seeds) of palm nuts, the fruit of the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) tree, in western Middle Africa.”

None the wiser I took the whole list of names to a newly opened African shop in Doncaster town centre new the town Library and asked for Moambe, luckily they had heard of it but were out of stock. I knew I was heading for Birmingham a few days later so I thought I’d try my luck there, unfortunately the only African shop I could find on Google was shut when I got there. It was a case of then waiting for the shop in town to restock Moambe, which they had when I returned yesterday. 

This is what Moambe looks like. 

To turn this concentrate into a sauce, all you need to do is 1 part of this paste to 2 parts of water and then boil for 20 mins. 

So all I did was 500ml water and added this to make the volume to 750ml. worked quite well. (I think)

Poulet Nyembwe Ingredients:

1 Chicken, cut into serving pieces (I used three chicken breasts)

1 Onion, finely chopped

1 Ripe tomato, chopped

20 Okra, chopped (I only used 15)

2 Garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 hot Chilli, chopped

Salt, Black Pepper and Cayenne Pepper to taste. (I used 2tsp salt, Lrg pinch Pepper and 1 tsp Cayenne Pepper. Maybe I needed just a tad more salt but I just added that at the table)

500ml Nyembwe Sauce

Oil for frying

Serves about 5/6 people depending on your appetite

Method:

Fry the Chicken and all the other ingredients apart from the spices and Nyembwe sauce in a large frying pan until the chicken has browned on all sides.

Reduce the heat then add the spices, 250ml of water and 500ml of the Nyembwe sauce.

Simmer on low heat for about an hour, or until all the ingredients have softened. Stir before serving to re-incorporate the palm oil then serve with Baton de Manioc (not sure what this is), FuFu (again not sure what this is) or rice.

The cooking process is very different to what I’m used to. With Indian cooking we normally tend to fry the onions until golden brown, then add garlic and chillies, then add tomatoes as well as other herbs and spices. Once everything is cooked thoroughly then add the chicken. So putting everything in the pot apart from the dry spices felt very strange to me. But I had decided to be as authentic to the traditional recipe as possible. 

Only one thing I noticed that was different from the pictures I’d seen on the website I took this recipe from was the colour; mine looked a lot more brown, theirs was more red. But I think that may have been down to me not using Palm oil. I instead used butter for my initially frying. 

I wasn’t too sure how this was going to taste so I didn’t make too much of it, but overall it wasn’t too bad. The average score from my family was about 6 out of 10. Personally I thought it deserved a little higher score but I’ll accept majority verdict. 

Ammo