Waakye is rice and beans cooked together with dried millet or sorghum leaves, which turn the whole thing a deep reddish brown. It is Ghana’s breakfast, its hangover cure, its office lunch and the dish by which everybody privately measures whether prices have gone up.
— Where to eat cheaply in Accra
What the leaves do, and what the limestone does
Two ingredients make waakye waakye, and they do different jobs.
The leaves are the dried red leaf sheaths of sorghum, cooked with the rice and beans and lifted out before serving. They give the dish its deep reddish brown and a distinct earthy taste. A cook using food colouring instead has made rice and beans, and you can taste the difference.
Kaun - powdered limestone, also called kanwa - is what makes the cooking water alkaline. That is what draws the colour out of the leaves and softens the beans, and it is behind waakye’s faint mineral edge. Too much is a common fault and tastes soapy.
Ordering is the real skill
Waakye arrives as a base plus a tray of accompaniments, and the order is built piece by piece. A seller will ask, or will assume the standard. The usual components:
| What | What it is |
|---|---|
| Shito | The black chilli and dried fish paste. Say how much. |
| Talia | Boiled spaghetti, laid over the rice. Sounds odd, is essential. |
| Gari | Coarse cassava grain, for texture. |
| Wele | Boiled cow skin, soft and gelatinous. The one newcomers hesitate over and then order every time. |
| Egg | Boiled, halved. |
| Stew and gravy | Ladled over everything. |
| Salad | Shredded cabbage, sometimes with a dressing. |
| Fish or meat | Fried fish, tilapia, chicken, beef, goat. |
| Avocado | In season, and worth the wait. |
Say what you want and how much. “Waakye, small shito, talia, wele, egg” is a complete and entirely normal order. Nobody is going to be surprised.
The price is built from the parts. The rice is cheap; the fish, the meat and the egg are most of what you pay. Two people can eat the same dish at very different prices.
Go early
Waakye is a morning food and the good sellers sell out. A seller who started at half past five is often finished by ten or eleven, and the queue outside a well-known one at eight in the morning is the whole review.
Buying waakye in the late afternoon means buying something that has been sitting since breakfast, which is the one way to make a safe dish risky.
Where to find it
Waakye is sold in every neighbourhood in Accra, usually from a table on a corner rather than from a building, by someone who has been on that corner for years. The famous ones are famous locally, they have queues, and they are found by asking anyone standing near you.
The reliable method is the same as for a chop bar: go at the right hour, find the queue, join it.
— Chop bars in Accra — Street food in Accra
Eating it
It is served in a black polythene bag, in a takeaway pack, or on a plate if you are sitting down. It is eaten with a spoon or with the right hand.
Mix it. The shito, the stew, the gari and the rice are meant to end up together rather than in neat quadrants.
Ask for less shito the first time. It is hotter than it looks and it is not a small ingredient; you can always ask for more.
Why it is the inflation index
Because everybody buys it, everybody buys it at roughly the same size, and the price is visible on a corner rather than published. When the price of a standard order moves, the whole city notices in a week — which makes it a better-understood measure of the cost of living than any official series.
— Inflation and the cedi — What a month in Accra costs — What to eat in Accra