Ghana's Rice and Beans, Steaming at a Morning Street Stall
When you are washing rice in the kitchen in the morning, a bowl of soaked beans beside it makes the usual routine feel a little like travel. Drain the beans, put them in a pot, and set it on the heat. Add the rice and cook it in the fragrant, brown-tinted cooking liquid, and the rice comes up a soft reddish brown, quite unlike plain white rice.
Waakye (also spelled Waache) is a rice and bean dish often eaten in Ghana for breakfast or lunch. Rice and beans are cooked together, and boiled egg, shito (a black chili sauce), gari (coarse cassava flour), spaghetti, meat or fish, and salad are added as you like. There is a small similarity to Japanese sekihan (red bean rice) as an entry point, but the way it is eaten is much freer. At street stalls it is wrapped in paper or leaves and handed to people on their way to work or school.
What makes waakye interesting is that it doesn't stop at rice and beans. There is the aroma of beans, the heat of shito, the gritty texture of gari, and the slightly mysterious presence of spaghetti. At first you may wonder, "Why is there pasta on a rice and bean dish?" But as you eat through the plate, you find that rice, beans, heat, oil, acidity and texture each do a separate job.
If Ghanaian fufu is the staple that catches the soup, waakye is the staple that gathers the sides on the plate. Unlike Nigerian jollof rice, which is colored red with tomato, this is rice colored quietly by beans and leaves. This guide keeps the key points of the dish while building it from ingredients that are easy to find, so it can be made at home.
In Ghana it is written "Waakye" in English. The pronunciation is close to "WAH-chay" and varies a little by region and speaker. It is often explained as coming from the Hausa "shinkafa da wake" (rice and beans), and it spread as a city street food under the influence of northern Ghana and trade culture.
What Makes Waakye Waakye: Beans, Color and Sides
If you turn waakye into a plain "rice cooked with beans", you lose about half of the fun of the original. What matters is the ratio of rice to beans, the reddish-brown color, and what you put alongside on the plate.
| Element | Commonly used in Ghana | Realistic choice at home | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beans | Black-eyed peas, cowpea-type beans | Black-eyed peas, cowpeas, a little kidney bean | The aroma and bite of the beans are the star |
| Rice | Mostly long-grain | Basmati, jasmine, or short-grain cooked firm | Too sticky weakens the character of waakye |
| Coloring | Sorghum leaves, millet leaves | If no sorghum leaves, just the black-eyed pea cooking liquid | Gives the reddish-brown look and toasty aroma |
| Heat | Shito, pepper sauce | Store-bought shito, or a quick version with chili oil and dried shrimp powder | Adds oil and heat to the plain rice and beans |
| Texture | Gari, spaghetti, egg | Gari, thin pasta, boiled egg | Keeps the plate from being monotonous |
In English-language Ghanaian recipes, a step using dried sorghum leaves for coloring often appears. Sorghum is a type of grain, and simmering the leaves or stalks gives a reddish-brown color. This gives waakye its look. But buying edible sorghum leaves reliably is not easy in many places.
So at home, start by getting color from the black-eyed pea cooking liquid. If you soak dried black-eyed peas and cook them thoroughly, a pale brown color moves into the liquid. It isn't a perfect reddish brown, but the aroma and texture of the dish come close enough. Only if you want to add color is there the option of a small amount of food-grade sorghum tea or hibiscus. Hibiscus adds sourness, though, so too much makes it a different dish.
The leaves used to color waakye must be sold for eating. Don't use ornamental leaves, garden sorghum, or leaves of grain plants of unknown pesticide history. Cooking only in the bean liquid is safer and tastes better than forcing the color.
Ingredients (serves 4)
The amounts of waakye change depending on whether you eat it as a staple or pile on sides street-stall style. Here the waakye itself is for 4 servings and the sides are the minimum for enjoying it in street-stall style. Adding meat and fish makes it very filling, so on a weekday egg and shito alone are enough.
This recipe contains eggs, and the quick shito may contain shrimp. Store-bought shito can contain seafood, nuts, soy and preservatives, so people with food allergies should check the ingredient list. Gari comes from cassava, but some products are made on lines that also handle wheat and soy.
Beans and long-grain rice, once you have them, widen your range of West African cooking. You can use them not only for waakye but also for jollof rice, dal bhat and biryani, so a big bag you can finish is worth more than small packets.
Long-grain rice is easy to find at Asian and Middle Eastern groceries. Black-eyed peas are sold at international groceries, natural food stores and online. Gari and shito are realistic from African groceries or online. For a first try, you can skip gari and start with just egg and quick shito and it will still taste like waakye.
Instructions
If you soak the beans the night before, the day itself is much easier. For breakfast, prepare the night before; for dinner, soak in the morning. If you forget to soak, use canned beans. Getting the cooked rice right matters more than forcing a start from dried beans.
Step 1: Soak the black-eyed peas (the night before)
Rinse 160 g dried black-eyed peas quickly and soak them in 4 times their volume of water. After about 8 hours the beans are plump. In hot weather soak in the refrigerator. Left overnight in a warm kitchen they can develop a fermented smell.
If you use canned beans, skip this step. But canned beans are already soft, so adding them from the start with the rice makes them fall apart. It is better to add them a little before the rice is done, or mix them in afterward so they keep their shape.
Step 2: Parboil the beans (25 min)
Drain the soaked beans and put them in a pot. Add 600 ml water, a pinch of salt and a pinch of baking soda and bring to a boil over medium heat. When it boils, reduce to medium-low and cook for 20–25 minutes. Stop when a bean pressed between your fingers still has a little firmness in the center. If you make them completely soft here, they will break down while cooking with the rice.
If you use sorghum leaves, put them in the pot with the beans and simmer to extract color. Remove the leaves when the liquid is reddish brown. Leaf fragments left behind spoil the texture, so if you're worried, put them in a tea bag to simmer. If you have no leaves, go on with just the bean liquid.
Step 3: Wash the rice and cook it in the bean liquid (25 min)
Rinse 2 cups of long-grain rice lightly and drain in a sieve. In a pot, combine the rice, parboiled beans and 400 ml of the bean liquid. If the liquid is short, add water to a total of about 420–450 ml for 2 cups of rice. Add 1 1/2 tsp salt and stir everything once.
Cover and bring to a boil over medium heat, then cook over low heat for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat and steam for 10 minutes without lifting the lid. Long-grain rice settles during steaming. Stirring right away can break the grains, so wait a little and then fluff with a fork.
After parboiling the beans, put the rice, beans and cooking liquid in the rice cooker pot. Use a little less liquid than for 2 cups of ordinary white rice, and choose the normal cooking setting rather than quick cook. When done, steam for 10 minutes and fluff lightly with a fork rather than a rice paddle so the grains don't get crushed.
Step 4: Make the quick shito-style sauce (15 min)
Put 3 tbsp oil in a small pot and sauté the finely chopped onion over medium-low heat for about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and ginger for 1 minute. Add the tomato paste and cook for 2 minutes until the color deepens. Add the chili flakes, dried shrimp powder and soy sauce and simmer 2–3 minutes more.
Authentic shito is blacker and is made by slowly frying fish powder, dried shrimp, chiles and oil. The home version comes out lighter, but don't be too afraid of the oil. Waakye itself is plain rice and beans, so a small amount of spicy oil pulls the plate together.
Step 5: Prepare the sides (15 min)
Put the 4 eggs into boiling water and cook over medium heat for 10–11 minutes until the yolks are hard, then cool in cold water and peel. Boil 120 g spaghetti in salted water for 1 minute less than the package says and toss with a little oil. Cut the tomatoes into wedges, slice the red onion thinly and soak it in water for 5 minutes. If you use canned tuna, drain the oil lightly; if you use cooked fish, remove the bones and make it easy to eat.
Sprinkle on the gari just before eating. If added early, it absorbs moisture and softens. Use just 1 tbsp at first. If you don't like the gritty texture, crushed fried onion works as a substitute.
Step 6: Plate it (5 min)
Mound the waakye on the plate and place the egg, spaghetti, tomato, onion and tuna or flaked fish beside it. Add 1 tsp to 1 tbsp of shito and finish with a sprinkle of gari. If you're worried about the heat, serve the shito on a separate dish.
How to eat it
You don't need to mix everything from the start. Take a bite of waakye, a little shito, break up the egg, add a pinch of gari. Adding tomato in between rests the heat. As with Ghanaian street food, it is more fun to build flavor on the plate little by little than to eat neatly.
For a sweet and spicy side, kelewele (in Japanese), plantain tossed with ginger and chile, goes well. On the days you want to get close to a full street-stall plate, keep the waakye lightly seasoned and layer flavor with the sides.
Substitutes for Authentic Ingredients
The two biggest worries with waakye are sorghum leaves and shito. Both create the local character, but trying to get everything perfectly right the first time makes shopping heavy. In a home kitchen, it works to separate "things you can substitute" from "things worth keeping if you can".
| Ingredient | OK to substitute? | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Black-eyed peas | Keep if possible | Cowpeas are close. Kidney beans turn sweet and heavy, so use a little |
| Long-grain rice | Keep if possible | Basmati, jasmine. If using short-grain, cook it firm |
| Sorghum leaves | Can substitute | Omitting is safest. For color, a little edible sorghum tea |
| Shito | Can substitute | Store-bought shito, or chili oil plus dried shrimp powder plus tomato paste |
| Gari | Can substitute | Fried onion, crushed shrimp chips, a little toasted breadcrumbs |
| Spaghetti | Can omit | A small amount of thin pasta only on days you want the street-stall feel |
Sorghum leaves affect the "look" of waakye. The center of the flavor is beans and rice, so it works as a dish without them. Omitting them on the first attempt actually lets you focus on how the beans cook and how much water the rice needs. From the second time, it's enough to look for edible sorghum leaves or sorghum tea.
Shito affects waakye's "drive to keep eating". With just rice and beans the flavor is gentle, but with shito it instantly becomes street food. If you can get store-bought Ghanaian shito, that is easiest. If not, just combining 2 tsp chili oil with dried shrimp powder, tomato paste and soy sauce gets you the direction of oil, heat and umami.
If you bought long-grain rice for waakye, use it next for jollof rice so nothing goes to waste. In Southeast Asia it works for nasi goreng, and in South Asia for biryani. Choosing the right rice reduces failure considerably in the world's rice dishes.
Causes of Failure and How to Fix Them
Waakye has few ingredients, so how well the rice and beans cook shows directly in the result. The four common failures are: hard beans, mushy rice, pale color, and vague flavor.
| Problem | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Hard beans | Not enough soaking or parboiling | Cook the beans alone for 10 more minutes before cooking with the rice |
| Mushy rice | Too much water, stickiness of short-grain rice | Next time reduce water by 2–3 tbsp and use long-grain rice |
| Beans break apart | Parboiled too long, canned beans added at the start | Mix canned beans in after the rice is done |
| Pale color | No sorghum leaves, too few beans | The flavor is fine. Prioritize the bean aroma over color |
| Weak flavor | Not enough salt or sides | Make up with shito and gari rather than adding more salt to the rice |
The most important thing is to parboil the beans before the rice. Putting dried beans and rice in the pot at the same time tends to leave the rice soft while the beans are still hard. Take the beans to just short of "slightly firm but edible" and then cook them with the rice, and they finish together.
Water depends on the rice. Basmati absorbs water yet keeps its grains separate and suits waakye. Jasmine has a good aroma and comes out slightly softer. If you use short-grain rice, use less water than for your usual cooking. It will be chewy, but it is still good as a rice and bean dish.
When the flavor seems vague, adjusting with the sides is closer to how it is eaten in Ghana than adding more salt to the rice. The heat of shito, the toastiness of gari, the mellowness of egg and the acidity of tomato each balance the flavor on the plate.
Storage, Make-Ahead and Next-Day Ideas
Waakye can be made ahead, but because it contains beans and rice, handle storage carefully. Don't leave cooked rice at room temperature for a long time; once it has cooled a little, refrigerate or freeze it promptly. Especially in summer, it is safer not to rely on a rice cooker's keep-warm setting for long.
| Storage method | Approximate time | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Refrigerator | 2 days | Spread thin in single portions to cool |
| Freezer | about 3 weeks | Wrap flat in plastic wrap and put in an airtight bag |
| Reheating | Microwave or re-steam | Sprinkle 1–2 tsp water and heat |
| Sides | Eggs: same day to the next day | Keep gari and shito separate |
Refrigerated waakye gets a little firm. Before microwaving, sprinkle on 1–2 tsp water and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Frozen portions can be microwaved while frozen, but breaking them up once partway reduces unevenness.
The next day, waakye is also good lightly stir-fried in a skillet. Heat 2 tsp oil, spread the waakye out and sear it, and finish by tossing in a little shito. Topping it with an egg turns it from a Ghanaian dish into a leftover-rice idea from an everyday kitchen, but the aroma of beans and spicy oil go very well together.
If you make it ahead, don't mix in the spaghetti and gari. Spaghetti absorbs moisture and gets heavy, and gari loses its texture. Store only the waakye base and add the sides just before eating for the cleanest result.
Background: Northern Rice-and-Bean Culture and City Street Food
Waakye is a dish closely tied to Ghanaian city life. Buy it from a stall in the morning and eat it at work. Have it wrapped before school. Eat it for lunch with meat or fish for staying power. It is made at home too, but for many people memories of waakye are tied to the steam rising at a street stall.
The origins of waakye are often tied to the food culture of northern Ghana and Hausa-related communities. The idea of combining rice and beans exists across West Africa, and the type of bean, type of rice and sides change from region to region. In Ghana, coloring with sorghum leaves, shito, gari, spaghetti and egg were added, and it grew into a one-plate city street dish.
From a Japanese viewpoint, mixing beans into rice and then adding spaghetti seems a little odd. But dishes that layer starches on one plate exist around the world. Egyptian koshari layers rice, lentils, macaroni and chickpeas. Brazilian feijoada goes with black beans and rice. Waakye is the same kind of wisdom: take rice and beans as the base and gather whatever side dishes you can get onto one plate.
What people often discuss in Ghana is which stall's waakye is best. The beans are soft, the rice isn't mushy, the shito isn't too hot, the gari is toasty, the meat and fish are generous. When recreating it elsewhere too, stabilizing the distinct grains of rice and beans first gets you closer to waakye than gathering every luxurious side.
Rather than remembering waakye only as "Ghanaian rice and beans", it is easier to make if you look at the role of the sorghum leaves, shito, gari and spaghetti. The idea of street-stall sides and coloring has been organized here to suit home shopping.
Variations and Building a Menu
Waakye is complete on one plate, but changing the sides lets it work for weekdays and for guests. You don't have to aim for the full Ghanaian street-stall plate from the start. At home it is easier to keep up if you center on rice and beans and add heat and protein to suit the people eating.
Minimal weekday version
Waakye, boiled egg, quick shito and tomato. That is enough. Beans bring protein and fiber and the egg gives satisfaction. Skipping spaghetti and gari makes shopping lighter. If someone in the family doesn't like spicy food, serve the shito on the side.
Weekend street-stall version
Waakye, egg, spaghetti, gari, shito, grilled fish and a tomato and onion salad. With all of these, it instantly becomes Ghanaian street-stall style. Salted mackerel works for the fish. Oily fish and hot shito go well together and support the plainness of the rice and beans.
Vegetarian direction
Without fish, meat or egg, add avocado, roasted peanuts, tomato, onion and cucumber. Omit the dried shrimp in the shito and make the oil sauce from tomato paste, garlic and chili alone, and it stays plant-based and satisfying. The combination of beans and rice has plenty of strength as a staple.
Building an African menu
To broaden into African dishes, it is easiest to place waakye as a West African rice and bean dish. Reading it alongside red tomato rice jollof rice, the pounded staple fufu, peanut stew mafe and fish and rice thieboudienne shows how rice, beans, root vegetables and sauces combine in West Africa.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Is it still waakye without sorghum leaves?
At home, yes. The reddish-brown look is weaker, but cooking in the black-eyed pea liquid gives plenty of the aroma of a bean and rice dish. If you can't get edible sorghum leaves, omit them. There is no need to use leaves of unknown safety.
Q2. Can I make it with short-grain rice?
Yes. But the texture is chewier than waakye in Ghana. Use 2–3 tbsp less water than usual and fluff lightly with a fork after cooking. If you can, basmati or jasmine keeps the grains separate and comes out more like waakye.
Q3. Can I use adzuki beans instead of black-eyed peas?
Adzuki beans make a bean and rice dish, but the aroma and sweetness move toward Japanese sekihan. To get closer to waakye, black-eyed peas, cowpeas or cowpea-type beans are recommended. Kidney beans are large and get heavy if they break down, so use a small amount.
Q4. How do I adjust the heat for children?
The waakye itself isn't spicy. The heat is on the shito side. For children and people who don't like heat, serve the shito on a separate dish and let them eat with tomato, egg and a little tuna. Adults can add shito on their own plates.
Q5. Can I freeze it?
Yes. Wrap single portions flat and plan on about 3 weeks in the freezer. When thawing, sprinkle on a little water and microwave. Gari, spaghetti, tomato and egg are better not frozen and added on the day you eat.
Summary
Waakye looks like a plain dish of cooked rice and beans, but it changes a great deal on the plate, and it is a Ghanaian standard. Start by getting black-eyed peas and long-grain rice and cooking them in the bean liquid. If you have the time, add shito, gari, egg and tomato. Don't force a search for sorghum leaves; use them only when edible ones come your way.
The goal on the first try is not perfect color. It is beans that aren't too hard, rice that isn't mushy, and a plate you can keep eating with shito and egg. Get that far and a little of a Ghanaian morning street stall comes into your kitchen.
If you move on from an introduction to African cuisine to other dishes, reading West Africa's jollof rice and fufu side by side is recommended. A dish of cooked rice, a dish of pounded starch, a dish with sauce poured over: once you understand each staple's way of thinking, African cooking becomes much closer to home.
Sources
- Ghana Tourism Authority. "Food and Drinks in Ghana." https://visitghana.com/food-and-drinks/ (accessed May 2026)
- Sorghum Checkoff. "Waakye." https://www.sorghumcheckoff.com/recipes/waakye/ (accessed May 2026)
- The Spruce Eats. "Waakye Recipe." https://www.thespruceeats.com/waakye-rice-and-beans-ghanaian-food-4155205 (accessed May 2026)
- Serious Eats. "Shito Recipe." https://www.seriouseats.com/shito-ghanaian-hot-pepper-sauce-5220231 (accessed May 2026)
