KO EN Ivorian Side dish⏱ 150 minEdit history

Attiéké (Steamed Fermented Cassava Granules)

Name: Attiéké (Steamed Fermented Cassava Granules)
Prep time: 1 h 30 min
Cook time: 1 h
Total time: 2 h 30 min
Yield: 6 servings
Cuisine: Ivorian
Ingredients: 2 kg cassava; 200 g already-fermented cassava; 2 L water; 1 tsp salt; 1 tbsp oil; 1 onion; 2 tomatoes; 1 lemon; 1 hot chilli; 0.5 stock cube

One of Côte d'Ivoire's national dishes. This site's kedjenou page names attiéké and then tells you that African grocers sell it dried or frozen — this is the page that makes it. The ferment is started by mixing freshly grated cassava with cassava that has already fermented, so the starter is a piece of the last batch of food rather than a liquid kept in a jar. Everything after that is taking water out: the mash is pressed under a weight, pushed through a sieve, and then steamed rather than boiled, which is the only reason it arrives as separate granules.

Steps

Peel the cassava thickly and cut out the woody core. Fufu gives the reason: the bitter and toxic compounds sit just under the skin, so a thin peel leaves them behind.
⏲ 30 min
Cut off a fifth of it, boil it 25 minutes and mash it. This is the portion that will carry the starter. Mix the mash with the 200g of already-fermented cassava you held back from a previous batch.
⏲ 25 min
Grate the remaining raw cassava finely — a box grater or a food processor. Work the seeded mash through it by hand until it is evenly distributed. That one action is the whole start of the ferment: nothing is brought in from outside, a piece of the food is held back and handed on.
⏲ 15 min
Cover with cloth or film and leave somewhere warm 2-3 days, until it smells sour and tastes distinctly acidic. Paocai keeps a brine going in a jar for years; what is kept going here is the mash itself.
Put the fermented mash in a cloth and press it under a heavy weight. Three or four hours, until almost nothing more runs out. That liquid is discarded — it belongs on the discard side of soaking. The pressed cake should crumble in your hand.
⏲ 240 min
Push the cake through a coarse sieve with the heel of your hand. You are after loose separate particles; anything that stays in a lump here stays in a lump in the steamer. Toss with the salt and a tablespoon of oil so the granules do not stick to each other.
⏲ 20 min
Line a steamer with cloth and pile the granules in loosely. Do not pack them. Once the steam is up, steam 20 minutes (steaming).
⏲ 20 min
Tip it into a wide bowl, break it up with a fork, sprinkle over two or three tablespoons of water and steam again for 10 minutes. Two shorter stages cook it more evenly than one long one.
⏲ 10 min
Fork it through once more while it is hot. It is right when the granules stay pale rather than going translucent, and do not cling to each other.
⏲ 3 min
Kedjenou is the classic thing to eat it with. For something quicker, spoon over onion, tomato, lemon juice and chilli mixed together.
⏲ 5 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

A first batch with no starter: grated cassava left alone for 3-4 days will ferment on its own wild flora. Slower and less predictable, but it works — and if you hold 200g back from it, every batch after that takes two days.
Dried or frozen attiéké: what African grocers sell has already been fermented, pressed and sieved. Sprinkle with water and steam it 20 minutes. That is also what kedjenou recommends.
Ghanaian akyeke: made the same way in western Ghana and spelled in Akan orthography. Sieved finer, so the granules are smaller.
Against fufu and akpu: Ghanaian fufu boils cassava and pounds it straight away into a stretchy dough, and Nigeria's akpu makes that same dough from cassava that has been fermented. Both are dishes that add water and work everything into one mass. Attiéké takes water out of fermented cassava so it falls apart into grains. Same root, opposite direction.
Against amiwo: amiwo stirs cornmeal into sauce until it sets — again the adding side.
Paired with dambou: West Africa's other steamed-granule staple. Same finished form, arrived at from opposite ends — dambou cracks a cereal and steams it into grains, attiéké presses the water out of a fermented root.

Tips

The pressing is the whole thing. A mash with water still in it comes off the sieve as paste and sets into a cake in the steamer, and no later step undoes that. Cutting the pressing short cannot be recovered.
Do not boil it. In water the surface starch has somewhere to go and the granules glue together. In a steamer each grain takes up only what condenses on it, so the surfaces never dissolve into one another.
Steam it in two stages. One heap steamed for thirty minutes is wet underneath and raw on top.
Use a sweet cassava variety and peel it thickly. Bitter varieties are not a home project.
The sourness is the point. As the kedjenou page says, that sourness is what suits a sauce reduced with no added water. No sourness at all means the ferment did not run.