Red Palm Oil Makes These Dishes West African Dishes Even More Special

This summer, when I first made ebbeh, a hearty one-pot stew popular across West Africa, I saw in the pot bubbling before me ingredients I’ve known throughout my life. I watched cubed cassava soften, chunks of smoked catfish perfume, soft-shell crabs and plump shrimp brighten, adding a saline sweetness to the simmering broth. I had found a new familiar stew.

My version veers slightly from the traditional by using smoked whitefish in place of kong (a smoked catfish), and store-bought lump crab meat in place of soft-shell crab. Chopped cilantro and lime wedges complete this dish, gratifying bliss in every spoonful. Like my favorites — moqueca, eru, red red and ọbẹ̀ onírù among them — ebbeh was rich, warm, nourishing, held together with another familiar ingredient: red palm oil.

A staple of West African cuisine, unrefined red palm oil lends color and umami to rich broths, lovingly slicks bitter greens and adds a floral yet smoky essence to anything in its path. But, in my experience, its critics conflate it with refined palm oil, a tasteless, odorless ingredient that comes from the same tree but features in cosmetics and commercial food production. Large-scale production of this oil has drawn ire for how it contributes to deforestation.

But red palm oil, in my experience, is largely the purview of small producers, made in the same sustainable manner for centuries, minimally processed in small batches. Amid the debate about more industrial varieties of oils made from the oil palm, like refined palm oil and palm kernel oil, we may have lost sight of how much red palm oil has been woven into communities and cuisine.

I’ve written about red palm oil before. This time, however, I wanted to spend time learning from others about the role it has played in their lives. In conversations with four women across the diaspora, I am left wondering if the word “ingredient” really does justice to its power. The red palm oil we use to complement stews like ebbeh is more than an ingredient. It is a conduit to African foodways.

Aimée Wallin, a managing director of the Ghana Food Movement

Often, we reserve a kind of reverence for certain staples of global cuisines, considering them the products of their specific soil, region or cultivation: spices, yogurt, butter, wine, olive oil, to name a few. It also applies to red palm oil, as Ms. Wallin understands.

The bottle she is currently cooking from, she told me, she made herself a year ago, with women in a beach community in western Ghana.

Over two days, they followed the standard method of production: harvesting the fruit, then boiling and pounding it to separate fibrous pulp from the kernel. Then, they again boiled the pulp in an enormous kettle until a lush oil rose to the top and could be scooped off.

As many other small producers do, that community in Ghana added its own twist, finishing the oil with nunum (a type of basil) and onion.

Technique varies meaningfully by community, she told me. “Communities will tell you exactly what makes theirs special — a nuance invisible to most.”

Ozoz Sokoh, an award-winning cookbook author and food researcher

Growing up in Warri, on the Southern coast of Delta State, Nigeria, Ms. Sokoh didn’t consider red palm oil particularly special. It was everywhere: Trees heavy with fruit lined the roads, bunches often carried home from the market, the nutty core enjoyed as a snack and the hard shell used as gravel for the roads. But in 2009, a Brazilian colleague described a red oil called azeite de dendê (the name in Portuguese for red palm oil), being used to fry a crispy bean fritter dish called acarajé, similar in profile to the Nigerian akara. Was this the oil she knew from the palms lining the streets of Warri? It turned out it was.

Ms. Sokoh recounted that, in Brazil, colonial powers tried to obliterate the African palm but could not kill the seeds. “The seeds replant themselves,” she said, referring to a process called sub-spontaneous growth. “You can’t get rid of them.”

Ronke Edoho, a noted Nigerian Canadian food blogger and entrepreneur

Red palm oil cultivation was the background for some of Ms. Edoho’s earliest memories. She was raised by her grandparents who farmed, produced and sold palm oil from the plot of land behind their home.

“I used to see the process from start to finish,” she said, adding, “Nothing in the process is ever wasted. The entire tree is used in an environmentally responsible way.”

In the cultural pushback she’s encountered online on palm oil, she sees the pitfalls of educating oneself only to a point: understanding the harms of industrial palm oil production but failing to grasp the significance of red palm oil to the people who’ve responsibly stewarded it long before colonial contact.

“There’s so much nuance in how we process it locally,” she said.

Emme Collins, chef and owner of Baiana, an Afro-Brazilian restaurant in Seattle

For Ms. Collins, red palm oil is dendê. Although she left Brazil as a child, she finds that its pungent, slightly floral smell carries her back to the streets of Salvador, and her aunt’s house where the family’s big dinners happened: It appeared in dishes like acarajé, moqueca, vatapá (and a little stirred into black-eyed peas).

In 1999, her family opened Tempero do Brasil, one of Seattle’s first Brazilian restaurants. To make moqueca, a menu favorite, they needed dendê. The West African markets were where they found the best red palm oil. Ms. Collins is now a restaurateur herself, and dendê touches nearly every plate. Her sourcing standards came from her father. The ingredients list must read 100 percent red palm oil with nothing blended in. The color must be a bright orange hue. “When it’s completely liquid,” she said, “it usually means it’s mixed with some other oil.”

A guide to buying red palm oil

• Avoid online sellers: A conversation with a shopkeeper goes a long way, and seeing the bottle in person can help you assess whether the bottle has been dyed or is rancid.

• Read the label: You want a product that’s 100 percent red palm oil and lists its country of origin — Nigeria, Ghana or Cameroon, for example.

• Look for a clean bottle: Dust means a bottle has been on the shelf for a long time.

• Look for a bright orange hue: But take care. A bottle tinged red could mean the oil — or the bottle itself — have been dyed in some way.

• Smell the oil, if you can: It should be floral and subtle. A mild soapy aroma denotes improper storage and possible rancidity.

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