Pombe Ya N'Dizi: the Final Product

January 23, 2010, was the first day I set out to make pombe ya n'dizi, the Tanzanian banana wine that Dorinda Hafner showcases in her cookbook A Taste of Africa. Six months later I have it in front of me, bottled and in a glass. Out of the original six liters (about six quarts) of liquid I eventually got two wine bottles' worth of wine. I was never able to strain the clouds of dead yeast at the bottom of the bottle, and I worried about what this would do to the wine.


The result of my first winemaking experiment: the banana wine is definitely a dessert wine. It's a bit thicker than most other wines I have drunk. What else can I say? It's a thick and extremely sweet banana wine that drinks more like a banana liqueur than a banana wine. Be prepared for that if you make it. And again, set aside six months for the process.

Pombe Ya N'Dizi, 3rd Straining

I am supposed to strain that Tanzanian banana wine four times. Did it the third time last week, about a week and a half too late (thanks again, Snowpocalypse 2010).


But it's now thrice-strained! I'll strain it again in three weeks, weather permitting.

Pombe Ya N'Dizi - Day 7

Stay tuned for a Restaurant Week post on Sascha's 527, where my sister and I went the other night, as well as another food ethnography post on some Tanzanian banana fritters. But to tide y'all over, here are some photos of the Pombe Ya N'Dizi project, day 7.

I am getting ready to strain the banana wine. I have to put it back into the jar, so I need to strain it first into this iced tea jug at left. It almost filled it twice.

Since I had never before made wine, I was kind of surprised by its really strong fermented scent. I was also wondering if it should be cleared up at all yet.

And here's the strained wine, jug cleaned out and refilled. Since it must be airtight, I sealed the rim of the lid with duct tape (yet another use for this versatile wonder of Home Depot).

Super Bowl Sunday holds little interest for me, since the Ravens didn't make it. So it officially become "Straining Day #3" and Day 14 of the Pombe Ya N'Dizi experiment.

Food Ethnography on a Budget: Tanzania II: Pombe Ya N'Dizi

After a very busy few weeks, I was able to return to my Tanzanian banana recipe project. True, Tanzanians don't put bananas or plantains in everything. That said, Dorinda Hafner, author of A Taste of Africa, puts it right out there in regards to the cuisine of Tanzania: "You can make an entire meal out of bananas!" That includes appetizers, entrées, side dishes, soups, desserts and beverages. The beverage she offers: banana wine.

Yes, I am currently making wine out of bananas.

To get another perspective on winemaking, I looked up "banana wine" elsewhere on the internet, and got hit in the face with a lot of items specific to homemade winemaking, including Campden tablets, wine nutrients and special "wine yeast." Hafner mentions none of these things - there is yeast, as you will see, but it is simply spread on toast. So honestly, I don't know if this recipe is going to work. And I won't know this for a while. You see, the entire process takes at least three months, though Hafner recommends six in order to get a more flavorful wine. And I'm doing it the way Hafner recommends, which worked for her.

The beverage: Pombe Ya N'Dizi (Banana Wine)

That measuring cup full of water? You'll need five more of those.

For this project, I had already bought most of the ingredients for the previous project. This includes several unripe bananas. But this project calls for the opposite: very ripe bananas (no standard, plain old "ripe" bananas for me). So really, I had to wait a while to start on this wine after I made the N'Dizi Ya Na Nyama. In addition to the seven thinly sliced overripe bananas, I needed a few other things:

• about 6 liters of water (right out of the tap)
• one slice of soft toast (just a piece of white bread I snagged at the parents' house - I actually don't have any white bread, which is strange)
• one cake of fresh yeast (not active dried - you need it to spread on the toast - this you can find at Giant for about $1.50)
• 4 lb sugar (one bag was about $2.50)
  

In addition, I needed a fairly large container in which to hold the wine. Since I don't have amphorae or wine barrels just laying around, I needed to buy this new. The 2.5 gallon air-tight jar I got at Bed, Bath and Beyond for $20 was easily the most expensive item I have put out for this or any Food Ethnography project thus far. On the plus side, I can use the jar for other things when the wine is finished. I also needed a piece of muslin to stretch over the opening for the first week. Jo-Ann Fabrics is currently selling cheap muslin for $2 per yard. I don't need to strain the wine with it, just cover it. This is also the first time I have gone to a fabric store to get something for a recipe.

The procedure that Hafner lays out is roughly as follows. First, boil the water. I used my crab pot to do this - too big is better than too little for these sorts of projects. After a good long while, the water will have started to boil. Thinly slice the bananas and add them to the water, boiling them for 20 minutes.

A beautiful bunch o' sliced banana!

Strain into a large vessel, add the sugar, and allow to cool. I let mine sit overnight.

THIS was a pain in the ass.

Banana wiiiiiine...

Seeeee-venteen...
The cold January moon...
Saw everything...

Once cool, cut the toast into four equal strips, and spread 1/4 of the yeast cake over the front and back of each strip of toast. Drop the yeasty toast strips (mmmm, yeasty toast strips) into the banana-sugar solution, cover with muslin and let sit for a week.

It places the yeast on the bread or else it gets the knife.

It's been two days since I did this. For now, it sits and waits. But just two days later, it looks really frightening. I love kitchen science!

Pombe Ya N'Dizi: Day 1...

...and Day 2

Really, this is all I have to report on the banana wine project for now. The wine gets strained next week, at which point it gets to sit in an air-tight container for another week before being strained again and left to sit for three more weeks, then left to sit for a month before being strained for the fourth and final time. It then can be bottled and corked until at least three months are up.

So that's it for now. Check back in for the weekly "Pombe Ya N'Dizi" report.

UPDATE JULY 25, 2010 - The wine is done! Read about it in this final update post.

Food Ethnography on a Budget: Tanzania I: N'Dizi Ya Na Nyama & Mchicha Na Nazi

The next stop on my Food Ethnography project is the East African country of Tanzania. This country has a wealth of recipes featuring bananas, plantains... okay, bananas and plantains. Seriously though, it's a lot more than just bananas and plantains. But these fruits feature heavily in the cuisine, so it's easy to fiind uses for them.

Food Ethnography: Tanzania
Located in: Eastern Africa
Some common ingredients: bananas, bananas and more bananas, not to mention coconut milk, curry powder, beef, silver beet, plantains and, of course, bananas.
Number of Tanzanian restaurants in the Baltimore area: 0
Number of Tanzanian restaurants in the DC area: 0
Kind of like: Kenyan with a generous hint of Indian, and lots more bananas

Tanzania, just south of Kenya, north of Mozambique and east of Rwanda and Burundi, is along the Indian Ocean. There are, in fact, some notable Indian overtones in Swahili foods. introduced by Arab traders in the Indian Ocean trade in the 700's - specifically curry, coconut milk, citrus and ghee. In addition, beef and silver beet - a green similar to spinach - are not uncommon. But when you think about Tanzanian food you have to think first and foremost of the banana. They are used in just about everything. In fact, you could make an entire Tanzanian meal from bananas and plantains.

Those aren't my words, though. They are the words of Ghanaian-Australian chef Dorinda Hafner, whose cookbook A Taste of Africa is my source for all things Tanzanian. A Taste of Africa is one of the first cookbooks I had ever seen that incorporated the cuisines of Africa and the African diaspora into one handy volume. It's also one of the first African cookbooks I had ever seen at all. Just about every recipe in the "Tanzania" chapter is based on foods from the banana family: banana beef stew, banana soup, plantain chips, banana fritters, even homemade banana wine! I've never been the most enthusiastic consumer of bananas. Now is better than never.

The meal: N'Dizi Ya Na Nyama (Beef and Banana Stew with Coconut Milk)

Hafner gives a very meaty recipe for coconut milk, beef and banana stew, or n'dizi ya na nyama in Swahili. You can also use plantains in this recipe, but bananas were easier for me to find. However, you must use unripe bananas or plantains for this recipe. This I have never seen, but that's what the recipe calls for.


Shopping for this recipe required a few ingredients that I did not have. However, most of them were not terribly pricey. It also helped that I halved the ingredients, which saved even more money. Perhaps Tanzanian cuisine is one of the more economical cuisines in the world, at least for us:

• 1 lb cubed beef (bought at Whole Foods for about $6 per lb. I very rarely buy meat, which is the only reason I could justify the expense. Surprise - this was still the cheapest beef I could find there. You can probably find it cheaper at Giant or Super Fresh)
• 1 onion (had it)
• 1 small tomato (one Roma tomato at $1.49 per lb - I bought two maters, hon, for about 90¢)
• about 1 cup coconut milk (one can cost me $1.49; I used it for this and a second recipe)
• vegetable oil (on hand)
• salt and pepper (yep, also on hand)
• 4 oz peas (had that, too)
  
• 3 unripe bananas (for this and a few other projects, I bought about 12 bananas at 49¢ per pound. They cost me a total of about $3. I used less than $1's worth for this recipe. Bananas are cheap.

Grand total spent on this recipe: about $8.50 for enough food to feed four to six people. Almost all of that was from the cubed beef.

The recipe (posted here on RecipeHound) is relatively easy: just braise the beef in the oil and a little water. Meanwhile heat but don't brown the onion (sliced) and the tomato (chopped) in a large pan. Next, add the meat mixture (or do what I did, and add the onion and tomato to the meat, since the meat was in a bigger pot), and add the coconut milk and cook until it boils. Next, add the unripe bananas (or plantains) in large chunks, and cook until the bananas are "cooked but not mushy" (Hafner's words).

Even though I cut the recipe roughly in half, it still yielded very much food for one person (lots of leftovers - yum). It's strange that a recipe with several very strong flavors - bananas (again, unripe), coconut milk, onions, beef - ends up not tasting as strong as I was expecting. The biggest surprise was the coconut milk, which is extremely subtle in this recipe. It doesn't really cut into the flavor of the unripe bananas. Maybe I added less coconut milk than I should have. As for the bananas: I have never deliberately eaten ones that were not ripe. I can't say I enjoy their flavor. The unripe banana flavor doesn't really detract from the flavors of the beef or the coconut milk. It's not a terrible flavor. It's just not one I'd enjoy eating often. I now know why I prefer my bananas ripe. Fortunately, Hafner has lots and lots of Tanzanian recipes featuring ripe and even overripe bananas! Two are coming up in future posts.

Love it, like it, hate it or meh, the n'dizi ya na nyama is complemented well by the spinach and coconut milk recipe on the next page of the cookbook, one of the few recipes in the "Tanzania" chapter that has nothing to do with bananas or plantains.

The side dish: Mchicha Na Nazi (spinach in coconut milk)


Again, I halved this recipe, and still ended up with more food than I could finish. However, I have to say I really enjoyed this one a lot. Perhaps it was the lack of unripe bananas? The ingredients cost me a good bit less than those for the n'dizi ya na nyama.

• 1/2 lb spinach (one frozen bag is 99¢ - or buy fresh spinach or silver beet. Really though, you could use just about any green for this)
  
• 1 small onion (this time, I went ahead and used a shallot, which I also had laying around)
• 1 small tomato (bought two, used one for each recipe)
• about 3/4 cup coconut milk (I was able to stretch the one can of coconut milk over two recipes)
• 1/2 teaspoon curry powder
• ghee (no ghee? You can use unsalted butter - or do what I did, and make some in a covered dish in the microwave, a la Julie Sahni. I had a stick in the fridge and just used half of that.)

Total extra spent for this recipe: $1 - and I only used 50¢ worth of that.

Mchicha na nazi is also surprisingly simple, less so if you use fresh greens (also posted on RecipeHound). If you go the frozen spinach route, you don't even have to thaw it! Just fry the onion, tomato and curry powder in the ghee for a few minutes, then add the coconut milk and spinach and cook for 15 minutes on a low flame.

I was worried this would be too rich, but I really got a nice taste of the coconut milk. I've never had spinach and coconut milk together and they blend well. It is an incredibly rich tasting and rich feeling dish and it is a side dish that will really stand out if you use it. And it's very versatile. I ate it with some turkey and stuffing the other day.

N'dizi ya na nyama and mchicha na nazi, with some of that Romanian cornmeal mush mămăliga

The n'dizi ya na nyama and the mchicha na nazi go well with rice, couscous, mashed potatoes or taro, even cornmeal mush. I ate it with some of that leftover mămăliga from the week before. Though from Eastern Europe instead of Eastern Africa, mămăliga (minus the cheese and sour cream of course) bears a striking resemblance to yet another member of the grits/polenta/mămăliga family: ugali, a pan-East African staple that is often eaten for breakfast and with other meals. I would've made some, but with all that mămăliga left over it seemed redundant.

In the next week or so, I'll be trying out some of these other banana recipes from Tanzania. One of them is made in the most wonderful way on the planet: deep-frying.