Tô with sauce gombo

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

For the tô

• 500 g fine sorghum flour
• 1.13 L water
• 1 tsp salt

For the sauce gombo

• 100 g dried okra, crushed
• 244 g onion, sliced
• 68 g soumbala
• 44 g dried fish
• 65 g groundnut oil
• 55 g liquid potash, or 9 g solid
• 3 g dried chilli
• to taste salt

Method

1. The sauce first. Pound the dried fish, soumbala, chilli and salt to a coarse paste in a mortar. A pestle bruises and releases; a blade heats and volatilises.
2. Fry the onion in the oil until soft and browning. Add about 800 ml water and the pounded paste.
3. Add the crushed dried okra and the potash. Boil 20 minutes.
4. Now the tô. Slake one third of the flour, about 165 g, in 300 ml cold water to a smooth milk with no lumps.
5. Bring the remaining water to the boil with the salt. Pour in the flour milk, stirring, to a thin gruel. Cook 5 to 10 minutes.
6. Remove about a third of that gruel into a bowl and set it aside. This is the whole technique. Do not skip it.
7. Rain the remaining flour into the pot and beat hard for 15 minutes with a stout flat-bladed wooden spatula. It will seize. It is supposed to.
8. Beat the reserved gruel back in, in two or three additions.
9. Cook a further 15 to 20 minutes, beating, until stiff, smooth and pulling cleanly from the wall.
10. Wet a ladle and form domes. Serve the sauce beside, never over.

Notes

After the weighed field study, scaled down, with the dried okra sauce from the same survey.

The recorded household formula also includes 27 g of stock cube, which I have left out of the table and am telling you about.

What a modern chef changes

Stock instead of water, the acid used as a starch lever, and the sauce timed to the paste

Rungs 1, 2 and 3

Method

1. Make the tô on stock. A light stock of smoked fish trim and onion skins gives a paste with body and length rather than a neutral carrier. Largest improvement available, and nobody does it.
2. Choose your pH and mean it. For a firm pale tô that holds a quenelle, 40 ml of tamarind water into the boiling stock at the start, which is what the millet version already does at 160 g of tamarind juice per kilo of flour. For a softer, darker paste, ash water instead.
3. Add the potash by weight, at roughly 1 g solid to 15 or 20 g liquid, and taste for the slippery quality rather than for a flavour. Getting that conversion wrong is how a sauce ends up soapy.
4. Time the sauce to finish thirty seconds after the paste. A draw sauce held warm is losing its draw, and tô held warm skins. This dish cannot be batched.