Latest news with #AfricanCuisine
BBC News
29-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
'Why I decided to raise my family in Dorset'
Dorset Day is being marked on Sunday to celebrate the county's heritage and BBC has been finding out what life is like for people from different cultures who live of those is Prince Ehiechukwu moved to England from Nigeria 23 years ago to study and arrived in the south not long after he graduated. He soon found himself working in Bournemouth and has since opened an African restaurant in the town with his now very much considers the town his home – but it hasn't always been was not as multi-cultural when he first arrived, he says, and his family suffered some racism. He says his children were among the only from black backgrounds in their nurseries and primary school."Dealing with it wasn't easy," he says."It's quite sad as a parent to see your children go through that."But, at the end of the day you don't let them beat you down - you make your children learn from it. We chose to focus on the positives." 'Different vibe' Prince's family-run business, Nativ, started from the Ogbujis' kitchen in after attending food festivals in and around the county, his family opened a restaurant on Old Christchurch believes part of his success is a result of how engaged he has been with the Bournemouth community."It is one thing to go to a different environment and just live your life, it is also about going there, engaging yourself, being part of where you are," he says."Dorset is like home for me, all my children were born here and the reason why we settled here is because we felt it was a better environment to raise a family."The growth of Bournemouth University, Arts University Bournemouth and several language schools has helped improve diversity in the town too, Prince says."A lot because people from all over the world come here to study," he adds."For me as a foreigner it was a good thing because I got to see it grow as a community - it brings a different vibe."You can hear more about Prince's story during a Dorset Day special on BBC Radio Solent this Sunday. You can follow BBC Dorset on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
News24
25-05-2025
- General
- News24
Sunday sweet treat: Rooibos-poached pears with Saffron ice cream
Rooibos tea is one of those proudly South African ingredients that is insanely versatile outside of the teapot. These rooibos-poached pears impart a sense of calm in the world that can only be described as you eat them. I adore the hot-cold combination of the pears and ice cream for that hot and cold sparkle. But, with or without ice cream, the pears will delight – the choice is yours. Want to make this later? Tap on the bookmark ribbon at the top of your screen and come back to it when you need to shop for ingredients or start cooking. Ingredients Saffron ice cream 2 cups cream 1 cup full-cream milk ½ cup brown sugar ½ tsp ground saffron A pinch of salt 6 large egg yolks 1 squeeze vanilla paste Rooibos-poached pears 3 cups water 4 rooibos tea bags ½ cup sugar 1 vanilla pod, halved and seeds scraped loose 4 firm pears, peeled but with the stalks in Method 1. To prepare the ice cream, heat the cream, milk, sugar, saffron and salt in a saucepan over a medium heat. Stir continuously. Once the mixture is scalding but not boiling and the sugar has dissolved, whisk the egg yolks in a bowl into a thick, aerated mass. 2. Take the milk mixture off the heat, then add about ½ cup of it to the whisked egg yolks and whisk together. Pour the egg yolk and dairy mixture back into the saucepan and heat on low until the mixture thickens. You will know it's done when it can coat the back of a spoon and a line remains when you drag a finger across the back of the spoon. Stir in the vanilla. 3. Before churning, be sure to cool the mixture for at least 4 hours or overnight. Churn according to the instructions of your ice-cream machine. 4. For the pears, add the water, tea bags, sugar, and vanilla seeds and pod to a deep pot. Heat until the sugar dissolves. Add the pears and poach for ±30 minutes, until they are soft but not disintegrating. Use a slotted spoon to remove the pears from the poaching liquid and set them aside. 5. Place the poaching liquid back over the heat and allow to reduce by half. The syrup will be pale and flavourful. 6. To serve, add a pear to each serving bowl with a scoop of ice cream and drizzle with the syrup. This recipe is an extract from Kamini Pather's debut cookbook, A ll Dhal'd Up! Every day, Indian-ish, Good-Mood Food. You probably know Kamini as the winner of MasterChef South Africa's second season and a food-loving TV personality who's taken the culinary world by storm, producing hit food-travel series like Girl Eat World. Her cooking is all about bold Indian-inspired dishes with an exciting global twist. All Dhal'd Up is her first full-length cookbook and her unapologetic love letter to flavour, where she serves up her signature style in every recipe.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
Africa's ice cream cafe that nurtures self-esteem
Tapi Tapi makes ice cream with a deep mission: to soothe the collective souls of African people by sharing folk traditions, rituals and cultures through food. Located in Cape Town's artistic centre of Observatory, Lower Main Road offers a fascinating array of thrift stores, cafes and restaurants best explored on foot. Among them is an unassuming ice cream cafe called Tapi Tapi (a Bantu ideophone [nyaudzosingwi] that means "sweet sweet") whose calligraphy-clad, alley-style entrance serves as an invitation to simply pay attention. That's because Tapi Tapi is no ordinary ice cream cafe. With a firm focus on rehabilitating the collective self-esteem of African people by sharing folk traditions, rituals and cultures through food practices, all its ice creams are handmade in small batches with ingredients typically communally sourced from the gardens of friends and patrons. Over the course of each month, you may find a curated menu of ice cream flavours that includes amagwinya (a deep-fried dough from South Africa), kelewele (an ensemble of caramelised plantain, ginger and fire-roasted peanut from Ghana), and nhopi (a roasted pumpkin and dark chocolate pairing common in Zimbabwe). In the next month, the menu might feature flavours like thiakry (a millet couscous and sour milk pairing from West Africa), mbwire mbwire (roasted sorghum biscuits from Zimbabwe), and mowa, an amaranth greens and yellow plum vegan dish that is enjoyed across the continent. No flavours are ever repeated. Founder Tapiwa Guzha says that Tapi Tapi started as a "self-imposed dare" that was largely inspired by childhood memories of lingering in his grandmother's kitchen whenever desserts were being prepared. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Guzha moved to South Africa in 2005 to study at the University of Cape Town and went on to earn his PhD in molecular biology in 2014. The following year, he began his postdoctoral fellowship in Stellenbosch, a wine oasis in South Africa's Western Cape province, where he recalls seeing a trilingual sign for the first time. "The default is Afrikaans and English for building signs, room names and that kind of thing," he says, "but the first time I saw a third language was Xhosa [a Bantu language], and it was a 'trespassers will be prosecuted' sign." This sparked an internal dialogue in which Guzha began to process the realities of being a black person in South Africa, where despite more than 80% of the population being black, the minority white population still holds the majority of all economic power. This led to increasingly nuanced explorations of different worldviews, which prize Western knowledge systems and food cultures over those of Indigenous people, and simultaneously, interrogations into the parallels between African cosmology and Western science. "I remember thinking about the difference between a rainmaker [a spiritual intermediary in various African traditions who requests rain through ritual] and a meteorologist. I don't necessarily believe in the ability to conjure up rain from nowhere, but I do believe in the ability to understand weather patterns and using that knowledge to drive a narrative in whatever context – but one system is not as valued as the other one," he says. Guzha remembers traveling from Cape Town to Stellenbosch and witnessing the lush vineyard and cascading mountain landscapes of the Cape Winelands, and the contrasting, painful realities of the wine labourers working on the farms. Simultaneously, he was finding himself feeling increasingly disillusioned by the academy and sensibilities of modern science. He found that the cities he was visiting for his postdoctoral research were repeatedly pointing him away from science and more toward the abundance of Indigenous agriculture and knowledge systems. Following his grandmother's funeral in 2018, Guzha returned to Cape Town, having decided to leave academia and instead do something in food. He had been making ice cream at home for eight years, and charged himself with a mission to turn his skills into a potential business. At first, he experimented with fermented and alcohol-infused ice cream, but then he came across snacks from his home country of Zimbabwe at a local restaurant and decided to try adding them to ice cream. The snacks included maputi (popped maize), Mazoe orange crush (an orange cordial, sometimes also used in cocktails and fruit punches), baobab (a large pulpy fruit with a citrus-like flavour), small and tangy masau fruit, and nyii, a sweet berry that can be eaten fresh, dried or candied. "It was the first time I ate ice cream that really connected with who I am. It was nostalgic and made me think of happy times. I connected with it beyond its delicious flavour." Guzha officially opened Tapi Tapi as a direct-delivery service in 2018 and has since gone on to ground his continental storytelling through ice cream into a brick-and-mortar cafe. The walls are adorned with Kasvikiro art, a self-taught Afro calligraphy inspired by his keen interest in alphabet systems and handwriting. A reminder also hangs on the entrance wall: "This is your home, the land of your people. Nourish yourself from it and tend to it so that others may enjoy it too. Remember, our lives, stories and histories don't begin in 1488 [when the first European rounded the southern tip of Africa]. You come from a time and place most ancient. We have been here from the very beginning." Since then, Guzha has gone on to collaborate with poets, conservationists, yogis and professors across a range of disciplines to host a range of educational experiences, including tasting menus and foraging hikes. Zandile Finxa, South African chef, consumer scientist, recipe developer and founder of The Sorghum Agenda digital campaign, explained how a visit to Tapi Tapi prompted a series of conversations about their different approaches to food. More like this:• A West African ode to a spicy and tangy chicken dish• The ancient lore of the humble Nigerian yam• Jollof Wars: Who does West Africa's iconic rice dish best? "I started talking to Guzha about cultural sociology, Indigenous foods and sustainability, and for me, he encompassed all of that," they say. For Finxa, engaging with Guzha allowed them to explore the academic side of Indigenous foods and customs drawing on Guzha's scientific background, while also learning from Guzha's cultural exchanges during his travels. Guzha and Finxa's conversations culminated in a collaboration in which Finxa developed a sorghum brownie that Guzha paired with his sorghum blondies ice cream. Many of the ingredients and ice cream flavours found at Tapi Tapi may not be readily recognisable to people outside Africa. However, this is the idea behind every scoop: to celebrate flavours that are, as Guzha says, "familiar, nostalgic, local and seasonal, homegrown, common and representative" of African people without any impositions based on legacies from elsewhere. "We are not the 'black version of [insert European inspired name here]'," says Guzha. "There's a lot of that going around. We don't use 'African sage' in our gelato, we use imphepho. So when you see a name you don't recognise in our flavours, Google it and get to know it for what it is and not for what it approximately represents in your food vocabulary." For those who cannot get to Tapi Tapi for the ice cream, Guzha offers a range of recipes using ingredients that can be found in the pantries of many African homes, including cookies coated in maize, millet or teff, celebrating grains that would not ordinarily be used to make sweet treats. He serves the cookies with the ice cream. For Guzha, with a little curiosity and willingness to play and experiment, we can take what have long been simple staples and turn them into delicious desserts. "There's a lot of magic around us all the time, pay attention and often the land provides. Don't wait on agriculture to feed you when there's bounty abound," he says. -- For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
