Burkina Faso: Food and the National Dish

A Sahelian diet built on grain

Burkina Faso is landlocked in the West African Sahel, and its food is built on grains: rice, maize and millet are the most commonly eaten, alongside sorghum and fonio. Peanuts, okra and baobab leaves are central to everyday cooking, grilled meat such as mutton, goat and beef is common, and livestock matters especially among the Fulani in the north; fish often reaches the pot dried.

The national dish: tô

Tô, widely regarded as the national dish and the staple of the Burkinabé diet, is a thick, stiff paste made from millet, sorghum or corn flour cooked into a dough-like consistency, eaten by tearing off a piece with the fingers and using it to scoop up a sauce. The sauce is really where the character of the meal lives: sauce gombo (okra), sauce arachide (peanut) and sauces of baobab or jute leaves are among the most common, each giving the same neutral, filling base a completely different flavour.

Riz gras, "fat rice" cooked with oil, onion, tomato and meat until it turns a deep red, is often served at parties in the cities, and is a variation of the jollof rice found across West Africa.

Dishes to know

Five more to recognise in Burkina Faso:

• Riz gras — rice cooked with oil, tomato and meat, the go-to dish for

celebrations and gatherings.

• Sauce arachide — a rich peanut-based sauce, eaten with tô or rice.
• Poulet bicyclette — free-range village chicken, usually grilled, prized

as leaner and more flavourful than farmed poultry.

• Bouillie — a thin millet porridge, a popular food for babies and adults

alike.

• Babenda — a Mossi stew traditionally made with millet, wild greens and

potash, now often with fermented beans, fish or cabbage.

Drinks

Dolo, a traditional beer brewed from millet or sorghum by women brewers called dolotières, is central to social life, drunk from calabashes at open-air bars called cabarets and served at ceremonies including funerals. Zoom-koom, a sweet drink made from millet flour, ginger and tamarind, and bissap, hibiscus juice found right across West Africa, are the common non-alcoholic alternatives.

Eating as a traveller

Vegetarians can rely on peanut and okra sauces made without meat, though most tô sauces are traditionally cooked with some meat or dried fish stock. Bottled or boiled water is the usual advice for visitors. Grilled meat, brochettes and poulet braisé are offered by almost all restaurants and bars in Ouagadougou. Most foreign governments advise against all travel to Burkina Faso because of the security situation.

What to take from the table

Tô, eaten by hand with a well-made sauce, is the dish that explains how most Burkinabé actually eat day to day — and riz gras, at a celebration, shows the same cuisine at its most festive.