The Senegalese chef with restaurants in New York, Pierre Thiam, has presented fonio in San Sebastian Gastronomika, a cereal with both nutritional and social benefits. It can replace any other cereal in cooking, contains five times more fibre than rice and has helped many populations to settle and survive in the area where it is grown: West Africa.

He left Senegal because of problems at university and started out in New York as a dishwasher. Pierre Thiam is now a chef well-known for having brought West African cooking to the world of haute cuisine with restaurants in Nigeria (Nok by Alara, Lagos), Senegal (Hotel Pullman, Dakar) and the USA (Teranga, New York). However he prefers to talk about his social work, which he carries out with his company, Yolélé Foods, to help small farmers in the Sahel (especially women) to open up new markets for the crops that they grow and that allow them to survive.

One of these is the one that he presented this Wednesday at Gastronomika. “Fonio is a really important crop for feeding the local population and helping to regenerate soils to prevent  desertification, but it is also a new ingredient similar to couscous and a cereal, “that ripens more quickly than others, with a great many properties for western cooking”. It is gluten-free; and has five times more fibre than rice. “It’s also really good”, he smiled. 

Thiam praised fonio and gave a master class about how to use it. Cooked in boiling water in just five minutes (“For each cup of fonio, a cup and and half of water”) and left to cool down, he made use of it to prepare some fonio, ginger, coriander and sweet potato (a very typical African tuber) croquettes, but with no egg, “as the sweet potato thickens all the ingredients”, or a mint, mango, tomato, cucumber and parsley salad with a final lime vinaigrette, in which fonio is just another ingredient. 

After being introduced, the Senegalese chef took part in defining the guidelines of the new African cuisine that had been presented at this Gastronomika congress. “In Africa you use your hands a lot because they provide you with information. You must touch the ingredients”, the chef explained while he was preparing the croquettes. He also stressed the importance in the gastronomic culture of the African continent of the act of sharing (“We are very hospitable”), and of playing a lot with the ingredients “as we hardly have any recipes. We pass them on from parents to children”.

Linked up from his house in California, the chef closed his presentation with a request: “With the crisis that we are going through, it may be a good time for us as chefs to think more and help, for example, to fight against climate change, which is closely linked to our food system. This is severely damaged”.