Riz Gras
Burkina Faso's 'fat rice,' a one-pot rice dish cooked in a rich, oil-heavy tomato-meat sauce, shared across the Francophone West African Sahel under the same name and technique. It's honestly a sibling dish of jollof rice rather than something unrelated: the real, modest distinction is that riz gras is deliberately more oil-rich, and its meat and chunky vegetables — carrot, cabbage, eggplant — are traditionally simmered separately and served atop the rice rather than stirred through into one homogeneous mixture the way classic jollof is.
Meat-optional
Ingredients
- 2 cups rice
- 600g beef, chicken, or goat, cubed
- 3 tomatoes, chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp grated ginger
- 1 chile
- 1 carrot, chopped
- 1/4 cabbage, chopped
- 1 eggplant, chopped
- Oil, stock, bay leaf, seasoning cube
Steps
- Brown the meat and set aside.
- Build a tomato-onion-garlic-ginger-chile base and fry in generous oil until deeply reduced.
- Return the meat, add stock, and simmer until tender.
- Add the rice to the sauce and cook until the liquid is absorbed.
- Separately simmer the carrot, cabbage, and eggplant, and serve them with the meat atop the rice.