Southern Africa · Volume 20, Desert, Coast and Funge
Mufete
Luanda
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Mufete is the Luanda weekend meal: grilled whole fish, classically cacusso, with an onion and vinegar sauce, and around it beans in palm oil, boiled cassava, sweet potato, plantain and farofa. A provenance note. The Angolan sources describe mufete as an assembly rather than as a recipe with numbers. The proportions below are mine, built from that description, and I would rather say so than dress them up as traditional.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
- 2 whole tilapia or sea bream, 600 to 800 g each
- 2 onions, sliced very thin
- 100 ml white wine vinegar
- 3 tbsp red palm oil, for the onion sauce
- 1 gindungo, or 1 scotch bonnet, chopped
- 400 g cooked butter beans
- 150 ml red palm oil, for the beans
- 1 onion and 2 garlic cloves, for the beans
- 500 g cassava, peeled
- 2 sweet potatoes
- 2 ripe plantains
- 4 tbsp farofa (toasted cassava meal)
- to taste coarse salt
Method
- The beans first. Sweat the onion and garlic in the 150 ml of palm oil, add the beans and a ladle of their liquor, and stew gently 20 minutes until glossy and the oil has emulsified into the liquor. Salt at the end.
- Salt the fish inside and out, leave 20 minutes, then grill over coals or under a very hot grill 6 to 8 minutes a side, until the skin blisters and the flesh at the backbone is just set.
- The onion sauce is raw and it is not a dressing. Combine the sliced onion, vinegar, 3 tbsp palm oil, chopped chilli and a good pinch of salt and leave 30 minutes to soften and weep.
- Boil the cassava and sweet potato, fry the plantain, toast the farofa in a dry pan until it smells nutty.
- Lay it all out on one board. Spoon the onion sauce over the fish at the table.
What a modern chef changes
The fish brined, the beans emulsified on purpose, and the platter given a spine
Rungs 2, 5 and 6
Method
- Brine the fish rather than salting it dry. Twenty minutes in a 6 per cent brine seasons evenly to the bone, firms the flesh through partial protein solubilisation, and gives a skin that dries fast and blisters properly. Pat it bone dry before it goes near the fire.
- Grill it on the plate, not the grate. The kapana argument applies to a whole fish: a cast-iron plancha holds contact and heat, the skin does not stick to bars and tear, and the fish keeps its own fat under it.
- Emulsify the beans deliberately. Take a ladleful out, crush it to a paste and stir it back in: the released starch holds the palm oil in suspension rather than letting it float.
- Make the onion sauce two hours ahead and drain it. Pour off the weeping liquid, reduce it by half, cool it and stir it back through, so the acid arrives concentrated and does not flood the board.