Yam

 I didn't know how clueless I was about yams.  I thought they were just like sweet potatoes...

It turns out, they're usually way bigger.  

And they taste different.

This one was a medium size.

It can feed the two of us for at least three meals!

Boiled with salt (see below), it tasted half sweet potato, half manioc. 

Here's where it gets interesting: turning boiled yam into Ku Tô.

A previous blog post showed you the making of other types of tô.  That kind was made by stirring flour into boiling water.  

Ku (the name for yam in Djoula) is made into tô by pounding the boiled yam in a mortar. 

You can see how stretchy it became, like the same thing that happens when kneading bread dough.  Adama pounded the yam for 15 minutes, but the end product was still a bit chunky because our mortar isn't well-shaped from use.

Check out the video: Pounding Ku Tô

 

Here's the finished tô.  It tasted different than plain boiled yam, although the only difference was in the pounding.  The ku tô stuck to my fingers while we were eating it.  That time we ate it with some yummy peanut butter sauce.