Ugandan Groundnut Stew Video

If you were to ask me what one challenge I face in blogging, it would be recipe writing. You see I come from a background where food is not measured. Where cooking is based on instinct and experience. Where you try this and try that until you achieve the taste you are going for. Someone once asked me on Instagram what serving size a certain dish called for and I had a hard time explaining because again, serving sizes are a rare thing in African cooking. You will notice this with sombe (which you can get from an e-book when you subscribe to my newsletter. Link is in the sidebar). Elaborate and thorough dishes like sombe, oluwombo, groundnut stew, etc are hard to quantify. You just know when to stop adding salt, spice, water etc. With that said, I still desire to share these complex thorough dishes with you because they are amazing and I am an advocate for preserving history through and through.

So today I am sharing groundnut/ peanut/ kinyebwa/ kinyobwa soup/ stew because it is really great and also because I have been trying to perfect this kinyebwa for as long as I can remember. There are many way to make groundnut stew and every person has a method that works for them. I am sharing this method because, after many trials, this is the one that has been yielding the best results. Groundnut stew is basically a thick rich stew made out of ground/ punded groundnuts (also known as peanuts).

Here are a few things to keep in mind while making this stew:

The stew gets its dull pink color from the pink coating of the nuts that we prefer not to remove although there are people who remove the coating.
The stew is made by simply boiling water, adding the ground nut paste and salt and simmering til it reduces to a thick rich aromatic paste.
There are factory made pastes ( I made this Nile perch stew with the paste) which can be found all over the country but you can make your own groundnuts at home by using a mortar and pestle or a grinder. I used the latter.
Some people prefer to use roasted ground nuts while others don’t. The roasted nut paste heightens the flavor by adding a sweet rich toasty flavor.
Groundnut stew is sensitive and can spoil any time. Use less condiments and vegetables and make sure that it does not spill over.
Groundnut stew requires a lot of patience. It can cook for up to 4 hours depending on the amount you are making and the consistency and aroma you are trying to achieve.
If you notice, I have not included a specific measurable stew and that is because this stew doesn’t have strict measurements. It depend on how many people you are cooking for, the amount of ground nut paste you have and the consistency you are trying to achieve. With that said, I used about 250 grams of ground nuts which is roughly a cup and about 4- 5 cups of boiled water.

Now that you have known the basics of the stew, watch the video below to see how I made this stew from beginning to end.