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Chikwangue is a firm, sour stick of fermented cassava paste. Cassava roots are soaked in water for two to eight days, where lactic bacteria sour and soften them while the root's own enzyme breaks down its cyanide compounds; the soft pulp is freed of fibre, kneaded smooth, wrapped in leaves and boiled once or twice.
Fully documentedRoots and tubers2 days – 8 days
Recipe
Amounts from a sourceMass balance from Congolese production studied by ORSTOM (Trèche et al. 1992); 100 kg of raw roots give on average 35 kg of paste at 40 % dry matter. Households use no fixed amounts.
Running water, a pond or a drum, for retting[treche1992]
Wrapping leaves and string
The sticks are wrapped in leaves before the first cooking; synthetic string for tying them is becoming general[treche1992]
Starter
spontaneous
Total time across the recorded steps: 2 days – 8 days
Start
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What changes:Starting material: cassava roots, peeled and cut into pieces
Step 1 of 6
Peel and cut the roots
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
L. mesenteroides
L. plantarum
Yeasts
Roots are peeled before retting in 64 % of cases and cut into pieces in 54 %. Output: root pieces.
Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented
Microbes at work in this step
Not documented for this step.
Method
Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source
At a glance
Chikwangue is a firm, sour stick of fermented cassava paste. Cassava roots are soaked in water for two to eight days, where lactic bacteria sour and soften them while the root's own enzyme breaks down its cyanide compounds; the soft pulp is freed of fibre, kneaded smooth, wrapped in leaves and boiled once or twice. Made in 6 steps over 2 days – 8 days. The longest step, ret (soak) the roots in water, takes 2–8 days (Trèche S 1992) and runs at 28–32 °C (Trèche S 1992). Leuconostoc mesenteroides, which leads the active phase of retting and Amylolytic Lactiplantibacillus plantarum, which takes over at the end do most of the fermenting.
Chikwangue is retted whole in water, like foufou, but instead of being dried and milled the pulp is kneaded into a paste and boiled in leaves. Attiéké and gari are grated and fermented as a mash instead.
Ngudi-yakaLarge chikwangue of more than 5 kg, from the rural south of Congo.
FabriquéSmall chikwangue of about 600 g for one person, from urban workshops.
MoussomboOne-cook chikwangue, eaten in the northern forest zones and rarely sold.
Mbala-mpindaGroundnut paste kneaded in; see its own entry.
Safety
Retting is the main step that removes cassava's cyanide, and it must run its full time. In the ORSTOM study total cyanide was 91–417 ppm in raw roots, still 11–113 ppm in peeled roots after 3 days, and under 6 ppm after 5 days. The report calls the 10–50 ppm of free cyanide left after 4 days no longer toxic, but total cyanide fell below 6 ppm only at 5 days, so do not stop early. FAO notes that short soaking (four hours) is ineffective, while 18 to 24 hours of soaking can halve cyanide, and that cyanide is lost to the water as fermentation breaks the root cells. Chikwangue keeps only a few days before it moulds between leaf and paste.
Hazards the sources name: Clostridia, which make butyrate; low but probably underestimated.
The ORSTOM survey behind the 1992 report questioned women who make chikwangue, in rural Congo in 1989 and in Brazzaville in 1990. It found that 98.7 % of the urban workshops bought retted paste as their raw material. The report said that using compressed retted paste for transport and storage seems to be a recent innovation that let the urban workshops develop. It also noted that synthetic cloth for the first cooking and synthetic string for tying the leaf parcels were spreading, and that filtering and settling was replacing the slower comb for removing fibre in most regions.