Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Oil Palm along with all the recipes employing Oil Palm presented on this site, with 250 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Oil Palm recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Oil Palm as a major wild food ingredient.

The African Oil Palm Elaeis guineensis originates in Guinea, but is now naturalized throughout West Africa. It is a tall monocotyledonous flowering plant that's a member of the Arecaceae (Palm) family. Typically it will grow to 20m in height and bears long pinnate leaves at its crown, each between 3–5m in length. Flowers are produced in dense clusters, with each individual flower being small and bearing three sepals and three petals. The fruit is reddish and shiny (about the size of a Brazil nut) and develops in large bunches (which can weigh up to 30kg in total). The fruit takes five to six months to mature from pollination to maturity; it comprises an oily, fleshy outer layer (the pericarp), with a single whitish seed (kernel), which is also rich in oil. Both the pulp and seeds produce oil, with 22 kilograms of palm oil and 1.6 kilograms of palm kernel oil typically being extracted for each 100kg of fruit.


The tree is highly productive and can yield as much as 7,250 litres per hectare per year; which has made this tree the primary source of vegetable oil in many tropical countries. The pericarp oil is mainly used for cooking and the kernel oil is used for processed foods and cosmetics.


In West Africa, however, kernel oil is produced by hand. The fruit is often sold in markets (this being the whole fruit) and is boiled in water until the water part evaporates. The residue is then pressed to extract a reddish-orange oil known as 'red palm oil'. This is a very important part of West African cookery that's used more as a flavouring than a cooking oil (it can be bought in just about any market). It is also used as a condiment poured over simple meals such as fried fish and boiled rice.


The flavour is rich and interesting and certainly lifts the flavour of just about any meal.