Achu with yellow soup

As tradition built it

Serves 6. Total elapsed time 5 to 7 hours, most of it the starch.

Ingredients

For the achu

• 2 kg taro corms (Colocasia esculenta), unpeeled
• 4 large green plantains, unpeeled
• enough to cover the pot taro and yautia leaves to lid the pot, or a tight lid

For the yellow soup

• 1.2 kg lean beef, cow skin and tripe, mixed
• 200 g smoked fish
• 1.5 L water, to become the stock
• 120 ml crude red palm oil
• 10 g kanwa (limestone), a thumb-sized piece
• 120 ml water, for dissolving the kanwa
• 15 g ground achu spice, about 2 tbsp
• to taste salt
• to taste bouillon

Method

1. Boil the taro and plantains unpeeled, covered with a lid of taro and yautia leaves rather than metal.
2. Boil the meats and the smoked fish in seasoned water, 30 to 60 minutes until tender. Strain. Reserve the stock and cool it to roughly room temperature.
3. Peel the taro and plantain, mash them together, then pound. The green plantains go in first, for texture control.
4. Pound while the tubers are still very hot.
5. Dissolve the kanwa in the 120 ml of water. Let the grit settle. Decant the clear liquor and discard the sediment.
6. Warm the palm oil only until fluid, about a minute. Not hot, not bleached.
7. Combine the cooled stock, the warm oil, the limestone liquor, the ground spice, salt and bouillon and blend until smooth.
8. Pour the soup over the meats.

What a modern chef changes

Alkali decanted and dosed, oil probed rather than guessed, spice roasted whole to order, and the emulsion built with proper shear

Rungs 1, 2 and 5

Method

1. Probe the oil. The named failure mode in Cameroonian kitchens is combusting the oil. Bring it to 60 to 80°C and no further. Rung 1: at 150°C you are already losing 15 per cent of the beta-carotene in two hours, and at 200°C you lose 59 per cent.
2. Dose the alkali by volume, not by lump. Dissolve, settle for 10 minutes, decant. Then add the clear liquor to the blender in two parts, checking the colour and the break between them.
3. Roast the achu spice whole and to order. The named failure of commercial pre-blended achu spice is inadequate aroma against freshly roasted whole components. Roast about 10 minutes, grind, sieve through a chinois. Then hold the country onion back and grate a little fresh into the finished soup off the heat, because the sulphur volatiles that make this smell like the Grassfields are exactly what a hot blender destroys. Rung 5.
4. Use lean proteins and mean it. Tripe, cow skin and smoked meat. Excess rendered fat destabilises the emulsion, and the Pidgin diagnosis, oil stand for achu soup, is a fat problem and not an alkali problem.