Waakye (Ghanaian Rice and Beans Cooked with Sorghum Leaves)
Ghana's national breakfast: rice and black-eyed peas cooked together in the red liquor drawn from dried sorghum leaves, which give both the colour and a faint earthy note. The colour is not a dye, and half the dish is what goes on top of it.
Ingredients
- The rice
- Long-grain rice · Non-sticky is correct here400 g
- Black-eyed peas · Cowpeas; soaked overnight150 g
- Dried sorghum leaves · Sold as 'waakye leaves' at African grocers — this is the colour8 leaves
- Bicarbonate of soda · Deepens the colour, softens the beans. More turns it slippery0.25 tsp
- Water · The leaf liquor becomes the cooking water1.4 L
- Salt1.5 tsp
- The accompaniments (half the dish)
- Shito · Black pepper sauce fried with dried shrimp and fish; essential in Ghana
- Gari · Toasted cassava granules, scattered over for texture
- Boiled eggs · Always on top4
- Spaghetti · Talia, boiled and piled on. It looks odd and it is standard150 g
- Tomato stew · Tomato, onion and chilli fried down and simmered
- Avocado · Sliced; the rich counterpoint1
- Fried plantain or fish · Kelewele (spiced fried plantain) or fried fish
- Onion and tomato salad · Thinly sliced, raw
Steps
- ⏲ 5 min
Soak the black-eyed peas in plenty of water overnight, or at least 4 hours. The beans take far longer than the rice, and unsoaked there is no way to make the timings meet.
- ⏲ 15 min
Rinse the dried sorghum leaves and boil them in the 1.4L of water for 10–15 minutes, until the water is a deep purplish red.
- ⏲ 2 min
Lift out and discard the leaves, keeping the red liquid. That liquid is your cooking water — throw it away and there is no dish.
- ⏲ 35 min
Add the soaked beans and the bicarbonate to the red liquid, cover, and simmer 25–35 minutes until a bean gives under a fingernail but still holds its shape. Beans that collapse now turn the rice to porridge later.
- ⏲ 4 min
Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Washing off surface starch is what keeps the grains separate — see Cooking rice.
- ⏲ 3 min
Adjust the liquid so it sits about a finger's width above the rice you are about to add (usually 600–650ml for 400g of rice). Keep the rest of the red liquor aside in case you need it.
- ⏲ 20 min
Add the washed rice and salt on top of the beans, stir once, then cover and cook on low for 20 minutes until the liquid is absorbed. Do not lift the lid or stir again.
- ⏲ 10 min
Take it off the heat and let it stand, covered, for 10 minutes. Then fluff gently with a fork to release the steam — this is also when any uneven colour evens out.
- ⏲ 2 min
Taste for salt. Two ingredients need seasoning here rather than one, so it takes more salt than plain rice — the reasoning is in Salt and seasoning.
- ⏲ 5 min
Heap the rice on a plate and arrange boiled egg, gari, shito, spaghetti, stew, avocado and salad around it. In Ghana the whole assembly is what 'waakye' means — not the rice on its own.
Tips & Variations
Variations
- Which bean: black-eyed peas (cowpeas) are the standard and the closest to what is used in Ghana. Red kidney or adzuki beans change both the flavour and the colour.
- Without the leaves: the red comes only from dried sorghum leaves (or the dried stalk sheaths). There is effectively no substitute — buy them as 'waakye leaves' from an African grocer or online before you start. Cooked without them you have good bean rice, but not waakye. Colouring it with food dye is not the answer.
- Instead of bicarbonate: Ghanaian cooks traditionally use kanwa (potash, an edible ash). Bicarbonate of soda is the easiest stand-in and does the same job.
- A shorter spread: if you cannot manage everything, boiled egg, shito and gari are the minimum three. With those it still reads as waakye.
- As breakfast: in Ghana waakye is mostly a street breakfast or early lunch, often wrapped in leaves to take away.
- The other West African rices: Jollof rice takes its red from tomato, and Senegalese thieboudienne cooks the rice with fish. Waakye is the one whose colour comes from a leaf.
- On stacking starches: if rice under spaghetti seems strange, look at Egyptian koshari — rice, pasta and lentils on one plate by exactly the same logic.
Tips
- Beans first, rice second. Started together, the rice is porridge by the time the beans are done. Getting the beans to almost tender over 25–35 minutes first is the whole of the timing.
- Never pour away the leaf liquor. It is the single most common first-attempt mistake. The colour and the aroma both live in that water.
- Keep the bicarbonate to a quarter teaspoon. The alkalinity deepens the red and softens the bean skins, but past that point the rice turns slippery and tastes faintly of soap. A very small amount does a lot.
- Use long-grain rice. Sticky varieties clump and refuse to mix with the beans.
- Do rinse the rice. Unwashed, the surface starch clouds the red liquor and the grains cling together.
- Do not skip the 10-minute stand. Fluffed straight off the heat, it sets wet underneath and underdone on top.
- Season generously. Two ingredients need salt, not one — and leaving the rice bland because salty shito is coming just gives you bland rice under a salty sauce.
- Buy the shito. Made from scratch it means frying dried shrimp and fish in oil for well over an hour. A jar is genuinely fine, and it builds savouriness the same way as Building umami.
- Reheat leftovers with a splash of water and steam. Rice with beans in it firms up especially hard once cold — see Reviving leftovers.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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