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Dambou (Steamed Rice Grits with Moringa Leaves)

Name: Dambou (Steamed Rice Grits with Moringa Leaves)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 1 h
Total time: 1 h 40 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Nigerien
Ingredients: 400 g rice; 4 tbsp water; 1 tsp salt; 300 g moringa leaves; 1.5 L water; 3 tbsp oil; 1 onion; 2 hot chillies; 1 tsp paprika; 1 stock cube; 300 g lamb or beef; 1 tomato

One of Niger's national dishes: rice cracked to about the size of semolina, steamed rather than boiled so it stays as separate grains, and mixed with moringa leaves that have been boiled and wrung dry. This site's couscous page tips instant grains into a bowl, pours hot water over and leaves them five minutes, so why steaming is needed at all appears nowhere. Boil the same grits and the starch leaving each surface has somewhere to go, and everything sticks together; steam them and each grain takes up only what condenses on it. And there is no sauce in this dish at all.

Steps

Boil the moringa leaves 10 minutes. The leaflets are tiny, so they need no longer. Drain, rinse under cold water and let them cool completely.
⏲ 10 min
Squeeze the cooled leaves dry in your fist. Horta tells you not to wring boiled greens, because there the aim is for hot leaves to take up olive oil. Here it is the other way round: wet leaves put the granules back together (sigeumchi namul wrings them too).
⏲ 5 min
Crack the rice in a mortar or a grinder only as far as semolina. Not to flour — the grain has to still be grain if it is going to come out of the steamer as grains.
⏲ 15 min
Mix the salt through and rub in the 4 tablespoons of water with your fingers until it is evenly damp. Break up any wet lumps by hand. A lump goes into the steamer and comes out as a cake.
⏲ 5 min
Line a steamer with cloth, pile the grits in loosely and steam 20 minutes once the steam is up. Why this is not boiled is the whole dish: in water the starch leaving each surface has somewhere to go and cements the grains together, while in a steamer each grain takes up only what condenses on it and the surfaces never dissolve into one another (steaming).
⏲ 20 min
Tip it into a wide bowl, fork it through, sprinkle over two or three tablespoons of water and steam 15 minutes more. One heap steamed straight through is wet underneath and raw on top.
⏲ 15 min
Cook the onion in the oil for 5 minutes, then add the chilli, paprika and crumbled stock cube for 30 seconds only. Ground spice held longer than that turns bitter (blooming spices).
⏲ 7 min
Put the steamed grain in a large bowl, break the squeezed moringa in with your fingers, pour over the seasoned oil and lift it together with a fork rather than stirring. Stirring compacts the grains.
⏲ 5 min
Scatter the tomato over and serve the separately simmered meat beside it. No broth is poured on.
⏲ 3 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Dambun masara: made with maize instead of rice. Hausa names it after whatever it is made from — dambun shinkafa (rice), dambun masara (maize) — and millet, sorghum and fonio are all used too.
Instead of moringa: spinach or kale if you cannot get it, leaves only and finely chopped. Moringa leaflets are very small and high in protein, so they hold their shape through a boil; spinach collapses further, so halve the boiling time and squeeze it harder.
It is celebration food: ko.wikipedia notes it is commonly served at weddings and naming ceremonies. Having no sauce is half the reason — it does not fall apart as it cools and it travels in a big bowl.
Paired with attiéké: West Africa's other steamed-granule staple, arrived at from the opposite end. Dambou cracks a cereal and steams it into grains; attiéké presses the water out of a fermented root.
Against couscous: that page uses instant couscous, so no steamer appears in it. Making couscous from scratch in the Maghreb is what happens here — damp, steam, break up, steam again.
Having no sauce: every other West African staple on this site is paired with a wet sauce (fufu, thieboudienne, calulu, ndolé, red red, waakye, amiwo). Dambou has none. A few tablespoons of oil and the moisture in the leaves is all of it.

Tips

Do not take it to flour. How far you crack the grain decides the dish. Finer than semolina and the steamer gives you a paste.
Squeeze the leaves. Water left in them undoes both steamings.
Steam it in two stages. Twenty plus fifteen is far more even than thirty-five straight through, and forking it through in between is the point of the split.
Lift, do not stir. Finished grains stick when they are compressed. Use a wide bowl and a fork.
Keep the steamer water off the grain. As steaming sets out, water boiling up onto the cloth simply boils that patch.