Hello my dear steemians, it is another day of learning on steemit and today I am going to talk about the second most consumed crop after maize in Cameroon. I will be talking about “garri” made from cassava. Cassava is consumed in all regions of Cameroon and each tribe has its unique way of preparing it.

Some tribes used the cassava leaves to prepare vegetable soup. The cassava tubers are used by some tribes to make “miondo, fufu, garri, flour etc. Garri is widely consumed especially by students since it is easy to prepare. You just need a bol 🥣 of cold water, sugar, milk, and fried peanuts. Then you are good to go. It does not need cooking before eating for those who are lazy to cook. But for someone who loves swallowing food, it requires a little bit of time to prepare okra soap and then boiled water and make the garri with.

That said, of recent the price of gari has skyrocketed in the market. Many sellers gave excuses that it’s because of bad harvest that made prices to increase. So I decided to make my own garri since I have a cassava farm. Below I am going to show the different steps to make gari.

Steps to make Gari

• The first step is to harvest cassava in case you have a cassava farm or else you can buy the cassava tubers from the market. As for me, I have a cassava farm which makes it easy for me to harvest and peel off at the farm.

• After peeling the cassava, I had to wash it with water to ensure that the cassava is cleaned. If the cassava is not well washed, the outcome of the garri will reflect dirt particles. Some persons do grater their cassava but this requires a lot of work, time consuming and energy sapping. I prefer using grind machine to grind the cassava.

• Now you have to tie the cassava in a sac in order to drain starchy water from the cassava. This took me like 3 days before it was ready to use.

• I have to crush it using a local made sifter in order for it to be easy to fry. I have to remove all the lumps and crushed on the local sifter while placing a bol under the sifter.

• The garri is ready to fry. You need a frying pan, firewood and the frying spoon which is locally made using calabash. I placed my frying pan on the fire, allow it for some minutes to heat well. Then I put the garri and start frying.

• After frying, I placed a bag under the sun and air the garri on it. We should note that after frying, the garri still requires sun to get dry well if not it will ferment when you tie it in a plastic bag or even in a container. It can last for as long as you preserve it well.

After preparing my garri, I had to make okra soup to swallow some and regained energy used during the garri making process. This is one of the soup that we consumed garri with. Some eat it with eru, some with ogbono soup. I used goat meat, cray fish, egussi, palm oil, vegetable, Maggi, salt, smoked fish and ncanda to make the soup.

Thanks for going through my post and I hope you learn from it. At times some people have cassava and abandoned it in the farm because they do not know what to do with it. Some do not cultivate it because they do not know what to do with the cassava apart from boiled and eat. But I will encouraged us to cultivate it why not learn to use it to process either flour, fufu or garri.