Ghanaian food, from jollof to kelewele

Where to start if you have never eaten Ghanaian food

Order jollof rice, waakye, red-red and grilled tilapia in your first few days. Between them they cover most of what Ghanaian cooking is built on — tomato and pepper, beans, fermented grain, smoked fish and plantain — and all four are easy to find and easy to like.

Ghanaian food is mostly starch plus a strongly flavoured sauce or soup, with fish or meat somewhere in it. The starch changes by region and by time of day. The sauce is where the cooking happens.

If this is your first trip, or your first trip in a long time, it helps to read our notes on coming back to Ghana after years away alongside this — food is one of the parts people misjudge most.

Jollof and waakye: the two rice dishes that matter

Jollof rice is rice cooked in a base of tomato, onion and pepper so the grain takes up the sauce as it steams, and it is the dish Ghana is best known for. It is usually served with chicken, fish or goat, a little coleslaw or shito on the side, and sometimes fried plantain.

A good jollof is smoky at the bottom of the pot and the grains stay separate. Party jollof — cooked in bulk over wood or coal for a wedding or funeral — is widely held to be the best version, and people will tell you so.

You will quickly meet the rivalry with Nigeria over whose jollof is superior. It is a long-running, entirely friendly argument, and it is fine to join in. Having an opinion is more socially useful than being neutral.

Waakye is rice and beans cooked together with dried millet or sorghum leaves, which give the dish its reddish-brown colour and its slightly earthy taste. It is not spiced in itself. Everything comes from what is piled on top.

A full waakye plate arrives with an array of sides: shito, gari (coarse cassava grain), a scoop of spaghetti, boiled egg, a piece of fried or smoked fish, sometimes stewed beef or wele. You point at what you want and the seller builds it.

Waakye is a morning food above all. Sellers set up early, and by early afternoon the good ones have sold out. If someone tells you where to get waakye, go before midday.

If a waakye seller still has a full pot at three in the afternoon, that tells you something.

Banku, kenkey and fufu: the staple doughs

Banku, kenkey and fufu are the three swallow foods you will be offered most, and each is eaten with a different accompaniment. None of them is meant to be chewed at length; they are vehicles for soup, stew and pepper.

Banku is fermented corn and cassava dough, cooked and stirred over heat until it is smooth and stretchy. It is distinctly sour. It goes with grilled tilapia and a raw pepper-and-onion grind, or with okro stew, which is deliberately slippery.

Kenkey is banku's steamed cousin: fermented corn dough wrapped in corn husks or plantain leaves and steamed into a firm ball. It is more sour than banku and keeps well, which is why it travels. Ga kenkey and Fante kenkey differ in wrapping and in how sour they are. It is eaten with pepper sauce and fried fish.

The sourness surprises people. Give it a second and third mouthful with enough pepper and fish — the combination is the point, not the dough on its own.

Fufu is cassava and plantain pounded together until smooth and elastic, served as a soft mound in a bowl of soup. The three soups you will meet are light soup (a clear, tomato-based broth, often with goat or fish), groundnut soup (peanut, rich and slightly sweet) and palm nut soup (made from palm fruit, deep orange and heavy).

Fufu is swallowed, not chewed. You pinch off a piece with your right hand, dip it in the soup, and swallow it whole. Chewing it turns it gluey and ruins the texture, which is why people watching you will gently tell you to stop. The soup does the flavour work.

Red-red, kelewele and grilled tilapia

These three are the easiest Ghanaian dishes for a newcomer, and they are among the best. None needs any explanation at the table.

Red-red is a black-eyed bean stew cooked with palm oil, tomato and pepper, served with fried ripe plantain. The name comes from the colour of the oil and the plantain. It is filling, mildly sweet from the plantain against the savoury beans, and often meat-free — though not always, so ask.

Kelewele is ripe plantain cut into cubes, tossed with ginger, pepper, onion and other spices, and deep fried. It is sweet and hot at the same time, and it is an evening food — the smell of it frying is one of the ways you know the working day has ended. It is sold from small stands on the roadside, often with roasted groundnuts to eat alongside.

Grilled tilapia is served whole, scored, charred over coals, and brought to the table with banku and a bowl of ground fresh pepper, onion and tomato. You eat it with your hands. It is one of the best meals in the country and it is worth ordering at a place that grills to order rather than keeps fish warm.

Tilapia takes time — twenty minutes or more if it is cooked properly from raw. That wait is a good sign.

Shito, and how hot the pepper actually gets

Ghanaian food is genuinely hot, and asking for less pepper is completely normal and not an insult to the cook. Sellers adjust heat for children, for elders and for anyone who asks, every single day.

Shito is the dark, almost black sauce that arrives beside rice, kenkey, waakye and plenty else. It is made from dried chilli, ginger, garlic, onion, dried fish and shrimp powder cooked down in oil until it is deep and concentrated. It is salty, smoky, fishy and hot, and it belongs on almost everything.

Shito is added by you, not by the cook, so it is the easiest heat to control — take a small spoonful, mix a little in, and add more. The fresh pepper grinds served with banku and tilapia are hotter and sharper than shito, and they are harder to dilute once mixed.

Heat levels vary more by cook than by dish. The same plate of waakye from two sellers on the same street can be mild or fierce. Say "small pepper" or "no pepper" when you order and it will be understood immediately.

Chop bars: where the food is best and how to choose one

Eat at chop bars. They are small, local, often open-sided eateries serving a short daily menu of home-style food, and they are where both the best cooking and the best value are — restaurants aimed at visitors rarely beat them.

Choosing one is mostly about watching for a few minutes:

• Busy — a queue of local customers, especially office workers and drivers at lunchtime, is the strongest signal there is.
• High turnover — pots being refilled and emptied, not sitting half-full since morning.
• Hot food — food served steaming from a covered pot, not lukewarm from an open dish.
• Cooked fresh — fish and meat being fried or grilled while you wait rather than reheated.
• Visible washing — somewhere to wash hands, and staff using it.

The menu is whatever was cooked that morning. Ask what there is rather than asking for something specific; you will get a short spoken list. Once the day's pot is finished, it is finished.

Markets are the other place to eat well, and Makola in Accra is the clearest example — food sellers work among the traders, feeding people who are there all day. It is busy and tightly packed, so go with someone who knows it, keep your bag in front of you, and eat what is being cooked in front of you.

At a chop bar you eat with your right hand, and the left hand stays out of the food. Hands are washed before and after — many places bring a bowl of water and soap to the table, or point you to a sink and a tap. Use it even when you have used sanitiser; it is the normal courtesy and people notice.

Eating vegetarian or vegan in Ghana

Vegetarian and vegan eating is harder in Ghana than in many countries, because fish and meat appear as background seasoning rather than as the visible main ingredient. A dish can contain no piece of meat and still be cooked with stock, shrimp powder, dried fish or smoked fish ground into the base.

Shito is the clearest example — it looks like a chilli paste and is made with dried fish and shrimp. Many soups and stews are started with smoked fish. Even a plain-looking vegetable stew is often built on a meat or fish stock cube.

Ask specifically rather than generally. "Is it vegetarian?" is understood differently in different places; "Is there any fish, shrimp powder, or meat stock in it?" gets you an accurate answer. People will tell you honestly when asked plainly.

What works reliably:

• Red-red, when confirmed to be cooked without fish or stock.
• Plain rice or waakye with gari, fried plantain and a stew you have asked about.
• Kelewele and roasted plantain with groundnuts.
• Roasted or boiled yam with a vegetable sauce, asked about the same way.
• Kontomire (cocoyam leaf) stew, though it is frequently made with smoked fish, so always ask.

In Accra there are restaurants cooking specifically vegan versions of Ghanaian dishes, and they are the easiest option if you are strict. Outside the cities, explain what you cannot eat clearly at the start and expect to eat simply.

Drinks, water and keeping your stomach settled

Drink sealed bottled or sachet water, eat food that is hot and freshly cooked, and peel your own fruit — that covers most of it, and most visitors have no trouble at all.

A good deal of what people call food poisoning on a first trip is simply a change of diet. Ghanaian food uses more palm oil, more chilli and more starch than many visitors are used to, often in larger portions and later at night. Your system adjusts over a few days.

Sensible habits without the anxiety: sealed water rather than tap, ice from places that are clearly buying it commercially, hot food straight from the pot rather than lukewarm food standing in the open, and fruit you peel yourself — pineapple, mango, oranges and small bananas are everywhere and excellent.

Sobolo is the everyday cold drink worth ordering: dried hibiscus steeped with ginger, sometimes pineapple or cloves, served chilled and either sweet or sharp depending on the maker. It is refreshing in a way cold soft drinks are not.

Palm wine is the other drink to try — sap tapped from palm trees, fermenting as it sits, so it is mild and sweet in the morning and much stronger and sourer by evening. It is a rural and small-town drink more than a city one. Akpeteshie, distilled from the same sap, is far stronger and should be treated accordingly.

Carry small notes or keep mobile money ready for street food and chop bars; card payment is rare in these places, as we explain in our guide to cedis and mobile money.

Osu, Accra and eating in the evening

Osu is the easiest place in Accra to eat well across a range of styles in one evening, and it is a sensible base for a first food night out. Oxford Street and the roads running off it hold chop bars, grill spots, Ghanaian restaurants, Lebanese and Chinese kitchens and bars, close enough together to walk between.

Accra's food changes character after dark. Charcoal grills come out on the roadside for tilapia, chicken and khebab — skewered meat dusted heavily with a dry pepper-and-groundnut spice mix. Kelewele stands appear. Waakye, by contrast, has long since finished for the day.

Eat street food where there is a crowd and a fire. Anything grilled or fried to order in front of you is the safest and usually the best thing on the street.

Beyond Osu, Labone and Cantonments are quieter and more restaurant-led, Jamestown is the place for fish near the sea, and Madina and Makola markets are where you eat in daylight rather than at night. A day of eating fits neatly into a wider plan — our seven-day Ghana itinerary leaves room for it, and the Ghana travel guide covers how the regions differ.

Outside Accra the food is often better and plainer. Coastal towns for fish and banku, Kumasi for fufu, the north for tuo zaafi — millet or maize dough with a green soup — and guinea fowl, which is worth going out of your way for.

Eating well with someone who knows the place

We build food into the trips we run. Our drivers and guides know which chop bar in a town is the one people queue at, which market day is worth timing your arrival for, and where to stop between Accra and Cape Coast for fish that is actually fresh. If you are vegetarian, vegan or cooking for someone with an allergy, tell us before you travel and we will brief the guide so the asking is done for you.

You can see how food fits into a route on our tours page. Quotes are itemised, and you deal with a named trip manager rather than a call centre.

Questions people ask