Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Bambara Groundnuts along with all the Bambara Groundnuts containing recipes presented on this site, with 3 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 Bambara Groundnuts recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Bambara Groundnuts as a major wild food ingredient.



The Bambara groundnuts (also known as the Bambara bean, Bambara nut, Congo goober and hog-peanut is the bean of Vigna subterranea, a member of the Fabaceae (pea) family. Like the peanut, the pods ripen underground.

The plant was originally domesticated in West Africa and is named after the Bambara peoples of Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Senegal. However, due to its fast growth cycle (from planting to harvesting in 160 days) and its ability to grow in semi-arid conditions it is available grown in many sub-Saharan African countries. Typically Vigna subterranea is planted as a low density intercrop with sorghum, millet, maize, peanut, yams and cassava, where its ability to fix nitrogen aids the growth of the main crop.

Probably the most well-known usage of Bambara groundnuts is in the preparation of okpa, a breakfast pudding (related to moi moi) cooked in banana leaves from Enugu state in Nigeria. Now that I’ve sourced some Bambara groundnuts here in Durban, I’m going to use an industrial blender to make flour then I will share my wife’s recipe for okpa. The beans are really hard and to render into flour you need something much stronger than your typical household coffee grinder. However, if you can get hold of an Indian wet/dry grinder that will probably do the job.