Poulet DG

chicken braised with fried ripe plantain and vegetables: the dish named for the directors general who could once afford it

Origin: Douala, Yaoundé & Cameroon

From the journey of Banana.

Poulet DG is chicken with fried plantain, and DG stands for directeur général. The name is a joke about cost that has outlived the conditions that produced it. The dish appeared in Cameroonian restaurants in the 1980s, at a point when a whole chicken plus a quantity of ripe plantain plus imported vegetables was an expensive plate, and the implication was that this was what the managing director ordered. It is now cooked in ordinary households for Sunday lunch, and the name has stuck as a period detail. The plantain is what makes it. Ripe plantain, fried separately until the sugars caramelise at the edges and then folded through at the very end, brings a sweetness that runs against the chicken and the chilli rather than dissolving into them. Frying it apart and adding it late is the whole technique: plantain cooked in the sauce goes to mush and the dish loses its point. Cameroon sits where West Africa meets Central Africa and eats accordingly, and poulet DG is a reasonable emblem of that: a plantain staple of the forest zone, a chicken treated in the West African manner, and a handful of carrots and green beans that arrived with the colonial kitchen and stayed because they looked good on the plate.

Ingredients

  • 1 kg chicken, jointed into small pieces
  • 4 ripe plantains, yellow with black patches, cut into 2cm diagonal slices
  • 500 ml neutral oil, for frying the plantain
  • 3 tbsp oil, for the chicken
  • 2 onions, sliced
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 thumb of ginger, grated
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped
  • 2 tbsp tomato purée
  • 2 carrots, in batons
  • 150 g green beans, topped and halved
  • 1 red pepper, sliced
  • 2 scotch bonnet chillies, whole
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 tsp white pepper
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste

Method

  1. Season the chicken with salt, white pepper, half the garlic, and the ginger. Leave for twenty minutes.
  2. Heat the frying oil to 175°C and fry the plantain slices in batches until deep gold at the edges, about three minutes a side. Drain on paper and set aside. They should be caramelised, not pale.
  3. In a wide heavy pan, brown the chicken in the 3 tablespoons of oil on all sides. Remove and set aside.
  4. Fry the onions in the same pan until soft, then add the remaining garlic, the tomatoes, and the tomato purée. Cook down hard for ten minutes until thick and darkened.
  5. Return the chicken with the bay leaves and whole chillies, add 200ml water, cover, and simmer for twenty minutes until cooked through.
  6. Add the carrots, green beans, and red pepper and cook uncovered for a further eight minutes. They should keep some bite; this is not a stew of collapsed vegetables.
  7. Take off the heat and fold the fried plantain through gently, so it warms in the sauce without breaking. Taste for salt and serve at once.

Notes

Plantain ripeness decides the dish. Green plantain is starchy and wrong here; you want skins that are yellow going black, when the sugars are high enough to caramelise. Fold it in off the heat and serve immediately, because plantain left sitting in the sauce softens within minutes. The vegetables should be added late enough to stay bright.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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