Central Africa · Volume 09, Where Desert Meets Forest
Moula kawal
Eastern Chad and Darfur
Illustration
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 142 sources in the brief
The most technically impressive thing in either country, and almost nobody outside the region has heard of it. Kawal is made from the leaves of Senna obtusifolia, the sicklepod, described in the literature as a wild and reputedly toxic legume. Pounded, buried, fermented a fortnight, dried into balls: roughly 20 per cent protein, keeps a year, and among the Fur explicitly a meat equivalent. The full ferment is in Part Four. In Chad it is served over a rice boule, and the powder is sprinkled over a finished mullah as a seasoning.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 40 g crumbled dried kawal, as a starting dose
- 2 onions, sliced
- 200 g okra, or other vegetables
- 3 tbsp sesame oil, or clarified butter
- to cover bone broth to cover
- to taste chilli
- to taste salt
Method
- Crumble the dried kawal, or soak it: this crumbled dried kawal is your starting dose.
- Sweat the onions in the sesame oil or clarified butter until soft and beginning to colour.
- Add the kawal and the okra or other vegetables, add the bone broth to cover, and stew until the vegetables are tender.
- Season with the chilli and salt. Serve over a rice or millet ball.
Notes
The sources describe the dish rather than specify it: dried kawal stewed with onions, okra or other vegetables, and among the Nuba cooked in bone broth. No source gives weighed quantities for the finished sauce, so the figures below are a starting point rather than a specification.
Why it works. The ferment is dominated by Bacillus subtilis and Propionibacterium species and it is not acidifying: the pH moves by a maximum of 0.5 units, which puts kawal in the alkaline family with dawadawa, nattō and kinema rather than with the lactic ferments. Bacillus proteases hydrolyse leaf protein into free amino acids and peptides, and the process generates approximately 15 per cent volatile fatty acids by weight, mainly n-butyric at about 8 per cent. Butyric acid is the note people describe as cheese, or worse, and it is why a little seasons a whole pot.
What a modern chef changes
An honest substitution, kawal as a seasoning, and the broth doing the work
Rungs 5 and 3
Method
- You cannot buy kawal, so use the right family. Dawadawa or iru, Japanese hikiwari nattō, or Korean cheonggukjang: the same alkaline Bacillus chemistry, and all honest stand-ins. Miso and soy sauce are not, being Aspergillus and lactic ferments on a different axis, sweet and malty rather than pungent and peptidic.
- Use it as a finishing powder as well as a base. Dry the crumbled ferment at 55°C until brittle, grind, jar it. A quarter teaspoon over a finished sauce delivers the peptide load without a fortnight of cooking, and it is exactly what Sudanese cooks do with kawal powder over a mullah.
- Build the bone broth properly and reduce it. This sauce has no thickener and no fat emulsion, so its body must come from gelatin. Roast marrow bones and shin, hold at a bare simmer six hours, strain, defat, reduce by a third, then flake in a banda-type smoked fish at the very end for the smoke phenolics the ferment cannot supply.