Akpan, Ogi, Boule d’ Akassa

Nowadays we have fermented cornmeal flour readily available in almost all specialty food store or online. So, this made making Akpan a lot easier compared to how it is made traditionally. In fact, traditionally, the white corn grains are soaked in water for couple days, then roughly milled to allow the husk to be removed.

Once the husk is completely removed, the granulated flour is then ground until you obtain a fine humid flour.

A bit of water is added to the humid flour to form a firm paste. That firm paste is now left to ferment for about 3 days.  The fermented product is the akpan paste, and that is what you cook to make Akpan. Now there is an industrial process that dried up that fermented paste into fermented flour. And it is that fermented flour that I will be using to make my Akpan today. All you need for this recipe is:

• 1 cup of fermented corn flour
• 4 cups of cold water

In a shallow pan, start boiling 2 and 1/2 cups of your water.

In a bowl, mix the 1 and ½ cups of water left with your corn flour, mix it well.

Add about 3 tablespoons of that corn mixture to the hot water on your stove, while stirring to avoid lumping. Let the porridge mixture boil for about 1 minutes. Start adding the rest of the flour mixture to the boiling porridge on the stove while constantly stirring to avoid lumping.

Cook for 4 minutes or until thickened then pour in small bowls coated with a bit of water to avoid your Akpan to stick to the wall of the container. Please note that once the Akpan is cool it will be very hard so do not worry about your Akpan being too soft on the stove.

I love putting it in a mini cake mold for serving. I do not recommend putting your Akpan in a plastic bag to avoid toxic material leaching into your Akpan.

Serve your cool Akpan with fried tomato sauce, yebessessi, hot pepper sauce or any sauce of your like.