East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Ravitoto sy henakisoa
Madagascar, the highlands
Illustration
- Time
- 2 hours 20
- Researched
- Researched from 225 sources in the brief
Ravitoto literally means pounded leaves. Sweet cassava leaves are pounded in a mortar or put through a mincer until they are a coarse green paste, then cooked with garlic and pork of the fattest kind available. It is served with white rice and a tomato rougail, so the plate is white, green and red, the colours of the Malagasy flag. The pounding does two jobs at once, and Rung 3 explains both: it ruptures the cells so linamarase can reach the linamarin, and it destroys the leaf structure so two hours of cooking gives a paste rather than boiled greens.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. 20 minutes preparation, plus about 2 hours cooking.
Ingredients
- 200 g ground cassava leaves, rehydrated overnight in about 1 litre of water
- 500 g pork shoulder, in large chunks
- 1 clove garlic, chopped
- 75 ml vegetable oil
- 150 ml coconut milk
- 1 L water
- 1 tsp sugar
- to taste salt
Method
- Brown the pork in the oil.
- Add the garlic and salt and cook 2 minutes.
- Add the hydrated cassava leaves, the water, the remaining oil, the sugar and the coconut milk.
- Simmer over low heat until the meat is very tender, topping up with water as needed. Two other Malagasy sources give about 2 hours over low heat, stirring occasionally, or about 1 hour, in both cases cooked until no free water remains.
- The doneness cue is a state, not a time: the water has gone and the fat has taken over. A ravitoto that is still wet is not finished.
Notes
From a Malagasy source, weighed.
The coastal version, ravitoto sy voanio, is a separate dish, built on coconut instead of pork fat, with the coconut milk going in at the very end and about ten minutes of simmering after it.
What a modern chef changes
The pork rendered rather than browned, the leaf hydrated with intent, and the finish held back
Rungs 3 and 1
Method
- Render, do not sear. Cut the shoulder to 4 cm, start it in a cold heavy pan with 2 tablespoons of the oil, and take it slowly to a deep colour over 20 minutes. You want the fat out and available before the leaf arrives, because here the fat is the cooking medium for two hours and it is doing the Rung 3 job of carrying fat-soluble micronutrients out of the leaf.
- Hydrate the leaf in stock, not water. Same litre, made into a light pork stock from the shoulder trim. Nothing else changes and the depth roughly doubles.
- Take the coconut milk out of the main cook and put it back at the end. Two hours at a simmer breaks the emulsion. Hold it back, stir it in, give it 10 minutes, and the sauce is glossy instead of grainy.
- Finish the texture by hand. Traditional ravitoto is deliberately coarse. If you used a mincer, pull out a third at the end, pound it smooth in a mortar and fold it back: two textures in one bowl, arrived at with a pestle.