PaJohn Bentsifi Dadson, a fellow foodie and curator of the many Wango Wango Ghana adventures, recently stated in a Facebook post that ginger, garlic and onions are the holy trinity of Ghanaian cooking, and I couldn’t agree more! I personally use these as the base for many of my soups and sauces, sometimes adding it to spicy omelette recipes and even sweet dishes like kaklo (“plantain cakes”). Because I use this frequently and given the labor intensity of peeling ginger, onions and garlic, I make large batches of the base that I use over a long period of time. Sometimes I include additional herbs and spices – peppers, rosemary, cloves, anise, bay leaves- to make a large batch of all-purpose mixed spices. Despite the versatility of the all-purpose version however, adding extra herbs to my ginger-garlic-onion base limits its use for some particular recipes. To get around this, I frequently would just make the ginger-garlic-onion base as a stand alone mix and add dry herbs and spices as and when I need them for a specific recipe.

Because this ginger-garlic-onion base is prominent in a lot of my dishes, I decided to share my recipe for quick reference whenever it features in another recipe. There’s really no precise science to it and you could always modify the proportions based on which of the 3 “spices” you’d prefer to shine. For most of my sauces, I add additional chopped onions, and so I tend to favor more ginger and garlic rather than onion when I’m making my base.

Ingredients

• Ginger: 4 large roots, cleaned and peeled (weighs about 360g after peeling)
• Garlic: 3 large bulbs, peeled (approximately 40 medium/2 cups whole cloves)
• Onions: 2 medium, peeled
  Notes: To make this spicy, you may drop 1-2 habanero peppers or other hot pepper of your choice to the ingredients

The hardest part of this process is cleaning and peeling the spices. You may make this step easier by buying peeled garlic (which would cost more than if you got garlic heads and peeled them yourself).

Preparation

So here’s the fun and easier part. After peeling your ginger, onions and garlic, just roughly chop the ginger and onions up, throw them into a blender with the garlic (which you don’t need to chop) and blend till smooth. To make blending easier, add 2-4 tablespoons of water (depending on how your blender works you may need more). The processing could take up to 2 minutes depending on the efficiency of your blender and how often you’d need to pause to add additional water. Recipe yields about 4 cups of the base and can last anywhere between a week and a month depending on how frequently you cook or use the base in your cooking. Usually 1-2 tablespoons is a decent amount to use in a small batch of tomato sauce but you could definitely use more depending on your preferences.

Serving size: 2 tablespoons
Number of servings: 32