Almost every Ghanaian meal is a starch and a soup or stew, and almost every starch comes from five crops. Learn what cassava, maize, rice, plantain and beans become and the menu of any chop bar in Accra stops being a list of unfamiliar names.
This guide follows each crop from the field to the plate: what it is, where around Accra it grows and when, and what it is made into. The dishes each have a guide of their own.
Cassava
All year, best November to January. November to January is the main harvest, but the roots can stay in the ground and be dug almost all year once they are nine to twelve months old.
Greater Accra's biggest crop by weight and its most common by number of farms. Ada West is cassava country. In 2010 the region grew 68,170 tonnes of it.
What it becomes:
- Gari - grated, fermented and roasted into dry granules that keep for months. Eaten with beans as gari and beans, sprinkled over stew, or soaked in cold water with sugar, milk and groundnuts as a snack.
- Fufu - boiled cassava pounded with plantain into a smooth, stretchy ball, eaten with light soup, groundnut soup or palm nut soup.
- Banku - fermented corn and cassava dough, cooked and stirred into a firm, sour ball, eaten with okro soup or with grilled tilapia and pepper.
- Kokonte - dried cassava flour cooked into a dark, firm dough.
Buying: Fresh roots are on sale all year. Buy firm ones with no black streaks and use them within a day or two.
Maize
July to August and November to December, best July and August. Major harvest July to August, minor November to December.
Often grown with cassava in the same field. Yields in the region are low for Ghana: about 0.9 tonnes a hectare on 3,638 hectares in 2010.
What it becomes:
- Kenkey - fermented maize dough, partly cooked, wrapped in dried corn husks for Ga kenkey or plantain leaves for Fante kenkey, and boiled. Eaten with fried fish, pepper and shito.
- Koko - fermented maize porridge, the breakfast of the street, with koose or bread.
- Banku - with cassava, above.
- Roasted and boiled corn - on every main road after the harvest. Sweet corn: august and september. Roasted corn is easiest to find in August and September.
Buying: Fresh green cobs arrive after the major harvest. Dried grain keeps for months, so it is on sale all year.
— Kenkey and fish
— Breakfast in Accra
Rice
August to October. August to October, and again where the fields are irrigated.
About five tonnes a hectare, which is high for Ghana. Grown mostly on lowland and irrigated land such as the Dangme belt. Much of the rice eaten in Accra is imported, and local rice from the lowland fields is worth asking for by name.
What it becomes:
- Jollof - rice cooked in a tomato and pepper stew, and the subject of an argument with Nigeria that will never end.
- Waakye - rice cooked with beans and dried millet leaves, which turn it reddish brown, eaten with stew, shito, gari, spaghetti, egg and salad.
- Plain rice and stew, fried rice, and omo tuo - rice balls served in soup, on Sundays.
Buying: Freshly milled local rice is likeliest after the August to October harvest. Ask the seller where it was grown.
— Jollof and the rice dishes
— Waakye, and how to order it
Plantain
All year. Steady through the year.
The most versatile of the five, because it changes as it ripens.
- Green: boiled as ampesi and eaten with kontomire stew or garden egg stew; pounded with cassava into fufu; fried into chips.
- Yellow: fried, for red-red.
- Very ripe, black-spotted: cut into cubes, spiced with ginger and pepper and fried as kelewele, the street snack of the evening.
- Any stage: roasted over charcoal and sold with groundnuts.
Buying: Green for chips and boiling, yellow with black spots for kelewele.
Beans
Cowpea: october to december. October to November, and November to December.
The black-eyed cowpea is Ghana’s everyday bean. The bean in red-red and in gari and beans.
- Red-red - beans stewed in red palm oil with fried ripe plantain.
- Waakye - with rice, above.
- Gari and beans - with cassava, above.
- Koose - bean fritters, fried at dawn and eaten with koko.
Buying: Dried beans store well, so a bag bought after the harvest lasts.
And yam
Yam is the sixth staple, and as important as any of the five - boiled, pounded into fufu, or fried as chips with pepper and fried fish. Most of it is grown in the middle belt and the north rather than around Accra, so it is not on the seasons page, but it is in every market all year.
Eating the staples cheaply
The staples are the cheapest food in the city, and the cheapest way to eat them is cooked by someone else: a plate of waakye, kenkey and fish, or banku and okro often costs less at a chop bar or a roadside seller than the same meal cooked at home from scratch. Buying them raw pays when you buy in bulk after the harvest - a bag of gari, dried beans or rice keeps for months.
— Chop bars, and how to eat in one
— Where to buy food cheaply in Accra
Where next
— A month-by-month food calendar
— Farming in Accra: where the city’s food is grown
— What is in season this month
The seasons and figures on this page come from the research behind the seasons page, compiled on 6 October 2026; its sources are listed in full there.