Ouagadougou Food Culture

A millet or sorghum porridge stiffened until it can be rolled into a glossy, slightly elastic ball. The smell is warm dough and fermentation. The texture shifts from chalky to almost bouncy as you work it between fingers. Dip it into okra-goat sauce at night-market stands behind the Grande Mosquée. Vegetarian if the sauce is baobab-leaf based.

Not the Lebanese version. Here, short-grain rice is first fried in red palm oil until the grains blush, then simmered in tomato-onion stock with a single Maggi cube for umami depth. You'll hear the rice crackle before it hisses under the lid. The top layer forms a caramelised crust women fight over.

Scrawny free-range birds that did bicycle between villages. Spatchcocked, marinated in garlic-ginger-smoked-clove paste, then grilled over acacia coals until the skin blisters into black bubbles. The meat is firmer, almost gamey. The smoke smells faintly of sap.

Okra reduced until it trails slime like a snail, then sharpened with soumbala (fermented néré seeds) that smells somewhere between blue cheese and burnt onion. Eaten with boiled yam. The yam's chalkiness grabs the mucilaginous sauce so nothing slips off your fingers.

Beef, goat or gizzard, threaded onto spokes of bicycle wheel spokes (yes, ). The fat sizzles, pops, and spatters tiny burns on your forearm. Ask for "sauce piment" on the side - scotch-bonnets pounded with stock cubes and oil. One drop numbs a tooth.

A bitter-leaf and rice medley that looks like forest undergrowth. The leaves (sontè, aneglè) are blanched, squeezed dry, then sautéed with smoked fish shards so the greens absorb smoke. The crunch comes from fried millet grains sprinkled on top like croutons.

Black-eyed-pea fritters, aerated by grinding the beans twice. The batter hisses into a cauldron of boiling oil at 6 a.m.; the beignets emerge the colour of desert sand, crust brittle, interior feathery. Dip into homemade chili-ginger vinegar.

A chilled ginger brew, cloudy with sediment, sweetened just enough to let the peppery bite slap the back of your throat. Sold in recycled glass bottles stoppered with twists of plastic bag.

Yoghurt and millet couscous layered like parfait, the grains popping like tiny caviar. The milk sours slightly in the heat, developing a yoghurty funk. Add bissap syrup for floral notes.

Originally vegetarian fasting food, now popular Monday-Wednesday when meat prices spike. Eggplant is smoked directly over flames until the skin chars, peeled, then stewed with tomato and soumbala. The flesh collapses into silk. The smokiness lingers like lapsang tea.