Uganda Food Guide

Ugandan food is built on the banana, and not the one you are thinking of. Understanding that single fact reorganizes most of a menu.

Matooke

Matooke is green cooking banana, peeled, wrapped in its own leaves and steamed for hours until it collapses into a pale, dense, faintly sweet mash. In much of central and western Uganda it is not a side dish; it is the meal, and the word for food and the word for matooke are effectively interchangeable.

Visitors often meet it once, find it bland, and move on. That is a mistake made on the strength of one badly made plate. Well steamed matooke eaten with a good groundnut sauce is one of the region's genuinely distinctive dishes, and the leaf steaming is what makes it.

Katogo, and breakfast

Katogo is matooke cooked together with something else in one pot: beans, offal, meat, sometimes greens. It is above all a breakfast, and it is the dish to order first thing in a small place with a handwritten sign.

It also solves the blandness problem, because the matooke absorbs whatever it is cooked with rather than sitting beside it.

The Rolex

The Rolex is a chapati rolled around a fried egg omelette with tomato, onion and cabbage. The name is a compression of "rolled eggs" and it is made at street stalls everywhere, to order, in about three minutes.

It is Uganda's most successful culinary export in reputation terms and it is genuinely good. It is also the cheapest way to eat well in the country, and the stall that is busiest at ten at night is the one to join.

Luwombo, groundnut and the lakes

Luwombo is a Buganda dish of chicken, beef or groundnut steamed inside a banana leaf parcel, historically associated with the royal court. It takes time and is often ordered ahead, and it is worth the arrangement.

Groundnut sauce, thick and reddish brown, appears with almost everything. Posho, stiff maize meal, is the eastern and northern staple where matooke is the southern one.

From the lakes come tilapia and Nile perch, usually grilled or fried whole, and around Lake Victoria they are as fresh as anything on the continent.

Coffee, and what to drink

Uganda is one of Africa's largest coffee exporters, and unusually its robusta is indigenous: the plant grows wild in the forest around Lake Victoria. Most of the crop leaves the country, but Kampala has a serious coffee scene and the cooperatives will sell you the good arabica from the slopes of Mount Elgon and the Rwenzori.

Waragi is the local spirit, distilled from bananas or cassava. Buy the branded bottled version rather than anything decanted: unregulated spirits carry a real risk of methanol poisoning, which is a global problem the FCDO warns about and not a local slur.