How to make fresh Homemade Plantain and Cassava FUFU Powder/ Flour

Welcome to the Nava's Kitchen. Today I want to present my homemade Fufu flour or fufu powder using all natural ingredients. The actual ingredients you will find in fufu. Now back in the day, years ago, when I prepared my fufu using store bought fufu flour or powder, I always tend to find unnatural colors, streaks of colors in my fufu, which I found very disturbing. So I started using some of the fufu flour and natural ingredients such as plantain, a combination of that in preparing my fufu. I learned that from a friend of mine, Jennifer Bonzi. And then she also taught me how to use the plantain and the cassava in preparing my fufu. Now, I have devised another way of preparing your own fufu using fufu flour and I want to present that today. So let's begin. So friends, for the ingredients, you're going to be needing some plantains, cassava, and also some potatoes. I know, right? Potatoes and fufu, just wait and you'll see. It plays a very important role here. So believe it or not, these plantains are a week old and they are not ripened. What I did was I immersed them, completely submerged them in cool water and they will stay there up to a week without ripening. So I have peeled them and scraped off a thin outer layer of the plantains and this is just how I was taught to prep my plantains. Now I'm working on the cassava and with the cassava, you want to remove this hard peel off, right? And once that comes off, there is also a core that will need to be removed and I'll show you how pretty soon here. Now these are the potatoes. Now for the potatoes, you want a starchy potato because fufu needs to be sticky and starchy in the end. So you have to keep that in mind. And these are Idaho potatoes. They're pretty starchy and very delicious as well. So now I'm just going to rinse them all off after removing the peels off and we'll move on to the next step, which is slicing them all into very thin slices because the next step is to, after slicing them, of course, is to dehydrate them or dry them until they're bone dry. That way we can create the powder. So with the plantain, I cut them on the bias. And here is the cassava. So what I'm doing right now is I've cut them into half and that exposes the woody and edible core and that's what I just removed. So that is going to get discarded. That right there. Alright. Now I find that with the cassava being so dense, it's a lot easier to use a mandolin to slice them thin. The thinner they are, the quicker they will dehydrate and dry for you. And the same applies to the potatoes. Okay. So we're going to just keep doing that until all of our components are prepped, thinly sliced, and ready for dehydration. I purchased this dehydrator from Amazon.com. I will leave the link below in the description box if you're interested in getting one for yourself. It is inexpensive and it does a great job. So there are several layers so that really helps to dehydrate a huge amount of ingredients at a time. And so that's what I'm doing now. And you stack them to create sort of an accordion. And then you place the lid on, turn it on, and leave it alone. It took about two hours to dehydrate these. Now here where I live in Arizona, there is sun. A lot of heat. A lot of heat. It's like an inferno outside. So I use the sun a lot too in my preparations that require dehydration or drying. Alright. So I place some of them outside, which were the cassava as well as the potato. Now here, take a listen. See how dry that is? That snap is what you want. It is bone dry and ready to be converted into a flour. And these are the plantains. And here is the cassava. Also bone dry as you can see. Now when you thinly slice your cassava, you actually get flour and not coconut. If you're from Ghana, you know what coconut is, which is also a different swallow. It's like fufu. It's sticky as well. Here are the potatoes. And as you can see, the potatoes did get very oxidized. And it's fine. We can still use it. However, I didn't want it to discolor my fufu. And I typically would buy the store bought potato flour and preparing my fufu flour, right? To cut down on time. Because that works perfectly as well. So that's just by the way you can do that. But for the sake of the video, I wanted to show also how you can make your potato flour from the scratch. Alright? And then in that, in so doing, I encountered some issues. And that is okay. This is the first time I ever made potato flour from the scratch. And it was a learning moment for me. So yeah, you don't always get it when you're developing a recipe or developing something. You don't always get it the first time. And that is totally okay. Don't beat yourself up. You can always do research and fix it. So the way I learned how to fix it is, slice the potatoes thinly as I did previously. But before you dry them, soak them in hot brine solution. And then take them out and dry them. And it will not oxidize. And because of that little mishap, I now know how to prepare my homemade potato flour from the scratch. So our flour is ready. This is the cassava flour. And see how smooth that is? So that is ready. We set that aside. And you see that it's really white. It's not like kokunte, which has a pigment to it. And that's because those are cut they're prepared the same way, but they're not sliced thinly to dry outside. They're cut into chunks. And so it takes a longer time to dry outside. And because it takes a longer time, something like fermentation happens. And oxidization as well. Which is what brings that pigment to it. That brownish pigment. Alright, so this is the plantain that is done. And here are our potatoes. So I just crushed them with another tray on top of the tray they're sitting on. That way they can fit I can fit a bunch of the ingredient into my blender at a time. And blend it till we have a very smooth powdery flour texture. And that is the potatoes. So we are done. Now I put them all into separate containers because I could use the potato flour for instance in other preparations such as frying fish. It gives you a crispy outer layer when you use it for frying, for breading your ingredients that you fry. And I could also use the cassava flour as tapioca flour or powder. You know, so I try to separate them because I could always combine them when I'm ready to make the fufu. And that is what we're trying to do here. Hello friends and family. So it is several days after we prepared our fufu powder. And today I am excited to use it to show you how to make your own fresh fufu. No hassle. Let's get started. And now that we have all three components converted into flour, we're going to measure it out using the right ratio to get the perfect fufu texture in the end. So I measure out three parts of the plantain flour to two parts of the cassava flour to one part of the potato flour. And I sift them through a fine strainer because you're going to find some residue in there. It's just best practice to sift it. Although we use a very good blender, you are always going to find a little bit of residue that didn't quite make it to smoothness. That right there. It's just good practice to sift it through a fine strainer. So now it's really smooth. And that's our fufu powder in the making. So we're going to sift also the flour. Now let's talk about all the components. There are three of them, alright. And there is one odd ingredient which is the potato. So let's talk about that first. Why am I using potato flour in making fufu? We typically don't do that back home in Ghana. We do not incorporate potato in our fufu. However, the potato is going to kind of tame the extreme starchy nature of the cassava. And that's why I'm introducing it in there. Otherwise it's going to be way too sticky. The cassava is what brings that stickiness, that starchy nature to the plate. One thing is for sure. When ingredients like these, which are starchy, get dried or dehydrated, the starchiness gets intensified, alright. So the cassava becomes extremely starchy. So we use the potatoes to tame it. Now, the cassava is what brings the starchiness. That's the role it plays. And it also helps to get that perfect texture. And then the plantain is what really makes it nice and enjoyable. It has flavor to it. It also has a lot of nutrition. It's packed with potassium. And it gives it that nice yellow color. And this is really plantain fufu. That's what we're trying to do here. Plantain fufu powder. So we need the plantain in there. Now when plantain is cooked into fufu and it sits all on its own, just the plantain all on its own, it tends to firm up and it almost even becomes crumbly after a while. It becomes really dense. It's not sticky and it's not as stretchy as the cassava is. So you need cassava in there every time you prepare plantain fufu. So I hope that makes sense with why the combination of all three components. So now our fufu powder is done. I whisked it all together to combine completely and I have measured out two cups and that's what I'm going to be using to prepare my fufu today. I've added some water to it and combined it and this is the texture you want. You want it to be thick enough but not too thin to begin with. And you're going to use a spatula that's made from silicon. You can use that or you can use your wooden spatula that we use in Ghana. If you don't have one of those, no problem. A silicon spatula will do the trick. I have one of those wooden spatulas but I just wanted to use this to show you that if you don't have it, because it's not readily available in most homes, so you can use your spatula made from silicon and it will just do fine as well. Now as you start to stir, on medium heat by the way, you will start to see some lump-like structures forming. Those are really soft and easy to crush. So as you stir it and press the dough against the inner walls of your pot, it will crush it and smoothen eventually. You do not want to walk away from this. You want to stay with it and consistently stir the mixture up until the dough forms. Now fufu needs to be steamed. To cook it completely through because the last thing you want is to eat raw fufu. Now to do that, once the dough comes together and it kind of firms up, you're going to put some water in there and set your heat to the lowest setting. And here is the soup. Look at that soup. Hey soup, what's up? This is my Abencryo palm nut soup. You're going to enjoy this soup. It's linked below if you don't know how to prepare it. You can search right there in the description box. There is that soup as well as several other different soups, chicken soup, whatever kind of soup, peanut butter soup that goes perfectly with the fufu. It's so enjoyable. You'll have great conversations. I'm drifting away. Let me get back to the topic for discussion here. So now, you know, after adding the water, you let it steam for a few minutes until it's cooked through. Then do not stir until the water you have added comes to a sizzle, comes to a boil. You see it boiling? Do not stir otherwise it'll melt. Okay? So let it come to a boil first and then stir it to incorporate the water and your fufu is done. And to serve it, you want to present it really looking very nice and smooth just like that. And you can do this in a bowl. And your soup is ready. Dish your soup over it and voila! Look at that action right there. Beautiful! My beautiful family and friends, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode as I have. We have learned how to make our own fufu flour from scratch. And we know exactly what ingredients went in. No additives, no artificial ingredients. So if you enjoyed this video, please give me a thumbs up. And also, I would be so happy to see you on my next one. And don't forget to make it a great day and have fun, especially in the kitchen. It is chow time! Hehehehe