Fouti

Guinean steamed rice, twice-cooked over its own steam until every grain stands apart

Origin: Conakry & the Fouta Djallon, Guinea

From the journey of Rice.

Fouti is plain white rice, and calling it plain undersells the method. The rice is parboiled, drained, and then steamed over water in a perforated pot until it finishes cooking in its own vapour. It takes longer than boiling and produces something boiling cannot: grains that are fully cooked, entirely separate, and dry enough to take a sauce without turning to paste. In a cuisine built on leaf sauces and groundnut stews, that is not a small thing. Guinea sits at the heart of the West African rice zone. Oryza glaberrima, African rice, was domesticated in the inland Niger delta some three thousand years ago, independently of the Asian species, and the Upper Guinea coast has been a rice-eating region for the whole of its recorded history. That is why the enslaved people taken from this coast to the Carolinas carried rice expertise with them, and why the Lowcountry rice economy was built on knowledge that came from here. Most Guinean households now grow and cook Asian rice, which yields more, though glaberrima survives in the Fouta Djallon and is prized for its flavour. The steaming method is applied to either, and it is the method rather than the variety that makes the rice Guinean.

Ingredients

  • 500 g long-grain white rice
  • 2 litres water, for parboiling
  • 1 tsp salt

Method

  1. Rinse the rice in several changes of cold water until the water runs nearly clear, then soak for twenty minutes and drain.
  2. Bring the 2 litres of water to a rolling boil with the salt. Add the rice and boil hard for six to eight minutes only. The grains should have swollen and softened at the edges whilst staying firmly raw in the centre; bite one to check.
  3. Drain immediately and thoroughly in a colander and let it steam dry for two minutes.
  4. Set up the steamer: a pot of simmering water with a perforated steamer basket or couscoussier above it, lined with muslin if the holes are large.
  5. Tip the parboiled rice into the basket and heap it loosely. Do not press it down, as the steam needs channels to travel through. Make two or three holes down through the rice with the handle of a spoon.
  6. Cover and steam for twenty-five to thirty minutes. Halfway through, tip the rice into a bowl, fork it through to break up any clumps, sprinkle with two tablespoons of water, and return it to the basket.
  7. Test a grain from the middle of the heap rather than the top. When it is tender through, fork it out into a serving bowl and serve at once under a leaf sauce, a groundnut sauce, or grilled fish.

Notes

The parboil is the step people get wrong by taking it too far. Six minutes of hard boiling is usually enough, and rice that is nearly cooked at that stage will be mushy after steaming. Fork it through at the halfway point without fail, or the base of the heap compacts and steams unevenly. Leftover fouti reheats better than boiled rice does, precisely because it is drier.

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