Ugali: how to eat it with your hand, and why it has no flavour

Overview

Ugali is white maize meal stirred into boiling water and worked until it is stiff enough to stand on a plate and be cut with the edge of another. That is the entire recipe: flour, water, and about twenty minutes of hard stirring. There is no salt in it, no fat, no stock. It arrives as a pale dome, faintly steaming, with a smooth surface where the pot was turned out.

Its lack of flavour is not a defect and it is the thing to understand before judging it. Ugali is not a side dish; it is the plate’s structure. Everything else on the table — the greens cooked down with tomato, the stewed beef, the grilled goat, the fried tilapia — is salty, fatty and strong, and would be too much of itself eaten alone. The ugali is what carries it, absorbs the sauce and makes a meal out of components. Judging it by taste is like judging bread by whether it tastes of ham.

What can be judged is texture, and locals judge it closely. A good one is firm, dry to the touch and slightly elastic: you can tear a piece off and it holds its shape without sticking to your fingers. Undercooked, it tastes raw and floury and smells of uncooked maize. Overworked with too much water, it slumps and goes gluey. The difference between the two is entirely in the arm of whoever stirred it.

It is a regional dish and, in truth, more than that — it is the staple of a large part of the continent under a dozen different names. The Kiswahili word is the one used here. What makes it worth an article in a Nairobi guide is not exclusivity but centrality: this is the single most eaten thing in the country, and a visitor who leaves without having eaten it with their hand has had a version of Kenya with the middle taken out.

The maize itself is worth a sentence, because there is a choice hiding in it. Most ugali is made from sifted white maize meal, which is pale and smooth. Whole maize meal — unsifted, sometimes mixed with millet or sorghum — makes a darker, coarser, nuttier ugali that older people often prefer and that has more to it nutritionally. Both are ordinary; the second is less common in restaurants and worth asking for.

What to order

You rarely order ugali on its own. You order what goes with it, and it arrives alongside. The combinations worth knowing:

• Ugali na sukuma wiki — with collard greens fried down with onion and tomato. The everyday plate, cheap and good, and what most of the city eats at lunch.
• Ugali na nyama — with a meat stew, usually beef.
• Ugali na samaki — with fish. In the city this most often means whole fried tilapia from Lake Victoria, and it is one of the best plates here.
• Ugali na maharagwe — with beans.
• With grilled meat, where the ugali soaks up fat and salt and does the job the bread does elsewhere.

The technique matters more than the order, and getting it right is the difference between eating this properly and pushing it about with cutlery. Wash your hands first — a basin or a jug is usually brought to the table, and that is what it is for. Then, with the right hand only:

1. Tear a piece roughly the size of a walnut from the edge of the block.
2. Roll it in your palm and fingers until it is a rough ball.
3. Press a dent into it with your thumb, so it becomes a small scoop.
4. Use the dent to pick up the greens, the stew, the sauce.
5. Eat, and repeat. Nothing goes back into the shared dish once it has touched your mouth.

Nobody puts butter, salt or sauce on ugali itself, and asking for it will be understood as not knowing rather than as a preference.

What to avoid

Ugali that has gone cold. It sets hard as it cools and becomes rubbery and difficult, and reheating never quite fixes it. Where a plate sits under a lamp on a counter, expect that. It is made in batches through the service and a good kitchen turns it over quickly.

A slumped or shiny block. Correct ugali holds a clean edge where it was cut. If it spreads on the plate or looks wet and glossy, the ratio was wrong or it was not stirred long enough — the second is the commonest shortcut, because the stirring is genuinely hard work.

Judging the whole thing on the version served at a hotel buffet. Sitting in a bain-marie for two hours is the worst possible treatment for it, and that is where a great many visitors form an opinion. The honest version is at a lunch counter at one in the afternoon, made an hour ago, beside greens cooked that morning.

And a small caution that is about manners rather than food: this is eaten with the right hand, and the left is by convention kept out of the shared dish. Nobody will say anything, but it is noticed.

Practicalities

Ugali is one of the cheapest hot things you can eat anywhere in the city. A portion with greens at an ordinary lunch place runs to somewhere around 100 to 250 shillings; with a meat stew, 250 to 500; a whole fried fish will take it above that. In a hotel restaurant the same plate can cost several times more, and it is very rarely several times better.

Lunch is when it belongs. The city eats its main meal in the middle of the day and the small canteens — the ones that fill with people from nearby offices and workshops between about half past twelve and two — are where ugali is at its freshest, made in batches and finished before it can sit. In the evening it is still there and it is usually older.

There is no season and no ceremony. What there is, though, is a daily rhythm worth using: go when the room is full, not when it is quiet, because for a dish that dies as it cools the queue is the freshness indicator.

Cash and mobile-money payment both work everywhere, including the smallest counters; cards mostly do not. Take a small note. And if a basin of water is brought before the food, use it — it is not decoration, it is the cutlery.