West Africa · Volume 02, The Cassava-and-Bitter-Leaf Belt
Konkoé
Guinea, Susu coast
Illustration
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 133 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- 400 g konkoué (smoked catfish), or substitute smoked mackerel
- 2 tomatoes, or 300 g groundnut paste
- 1 onion, garlic
- 1 to 2, to taste chilli
- 60 ml palm oil
Method
- Soften the onion, garlic and chilli in the palm oil.
- Build the sauce either around crushed tomato, cooked down hard, or around groundnut paste, thinned and fried out as in Rung 4.
- Flake the smoked catfish into the sauce and simmer to let it release its smoke character fully into the base.
- Serve over rice.
What a modern chef changes
The fish chosen for what smoking actually does to it, and the sauce built to carry that smoke rather than compete with it
Rung 6
Method
- If konkoué itself cannot be sourced, choose a substitute for its texture and smoke intensity, not its species name. A hot-smoked mackerel or smoked eel, flaked, gives a comparable dense, oily, heavily smoked character that a milder smoked white fish does not.
- Fry the groundnut version out properly, Rung 4, before adding the fish, so the sauce's own savoury base is not simply riding on the fish's smoke alone.