Central Africa · Volume 08, The Forest Larder
Sauce odika
Gabon, and no equivalent anywhere else in this atlas
Illustration
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 103 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
Volume Three ground this same seed to a powder as ogbono and used it to make a soup draw. Gabon presses it into a block that keeps a year and treats it as a fat. Same genus, same seed, completely different technology, and the divergence is the most interesting single fact in this volume. A circulated Gabonese encyclopaedia entry describes odika as based on "the fruit of acacias"; Irvingia is Irvingiaceae, not Fabaceae, and that is simply wrong.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 150 g odika, scraped or grated from the block
- 2 onions, sliced thin
- 400 g smoked fish, or chicken, or game
- 2 tomatoes, chopped
- 1 chilli
- to taste salt, and water as needed
Method
- Grate the block coarse. It behaves like cold chocolate and will clog a fine grater.
- Melt the odika slowly with the onions over low heat, stirring, until the onions collapse and the fat comes out of the paste. Do not rush it and do not let it catch: the lauric and myristic fats melt low and the solids scorch easily.
- Add the tomatoes and cook down.
- Add the smoked fish or meat, loosen with water to a thick, glossy, pourable sauce, and simmer 20 minutes.
- Salt, add the chilli, serve with cassava, yam, plantain or rice.
Notes
Sauce chocolat as built for smoked fish or game.
Regional versions: ngomba g'odika, porcupine in odika, from Ogooué-Maritime; nguya, wild boar in odika, from Haut-Ogooué; mambe, a fish packet with odika, from Moyen-Ogooué; evoura tcha ndimba, caterpillars in odika. The sauce is made for weddings, birthdays and ceremonies, which tells you where it sits socially.
What a modern chef changes
Temper it like the fat it is, and build a stock under it
Rungs 3, 4 and 6
Method
- Melt it like chocolate, not like a stock cube. Grate it, put it in a bowl over hot water at 55 to 60°C, and let it go liquid gently before it meets a pan. Smooth emulsion, no scorched solids. Not a borrowed French technique: it is the Slow Food description, "warmed until melting", done with a thermometer.
- Build on smoked fish stock rather than water. Rung 3. Odika is a fat and a thickener that brings little savour of its own beyond the resinous, faintly cocoa note. Add only water and the sauce is rich and hollow at once.
- Hold back a third and finish with it off the heat. Rung 4's logic on a different fat: the volatile part of odika's aroma goes first, and a spoonful of gently melted block at the pass puts it back.
- Serve it with something brittle and something sharp. A cassava crisp and a wedge of lime. The sauce is fat-dominant and unacidified, and it flattens on the palate by the third mouthful without both.