Why it works: Cassava and banana work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and 9 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cassava
Soak the cassava tubers in a tub, pond, or stream for three days or longer.
Peel the tubers, and wash them in large tub, changing water several times.
Use a mortar and pestle to pound the tubers into a thick, smooth paste.
Wrap and cook
Put the paste into the leaves, fold them into packets, and tie them closed. (Make the packets uniform in size. Two sizes are common in Central Africa: either 1 to 2 inches in diameter by 12 inches in length; or 4 inches in diameter by 12 inches in length.)
Place sticks or a wire basket in the bottom of a large pot.
Stack the packets on the sticks, add enough water to steam-cook them (the water level should be below the packets).
Cover tightly and boil for four to eight hours.
This recipe comes from the Recipes Wiki on Fandom and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our formatting and summaries are shared under the same licence.
Steps grouped into stages for easier reading; the method is the source's own.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Cassava + bananatop 13% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together9 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cassava tubers
- Form the starchy paste that sets into the dense, firm body of the cake.
- Megaphrynium macrostachyum leaves or banana leaves
- Wrap the paste into packets that hold its shape and keep it moist while steaming.
The step that matters
Soaking the cassava tubers. Cassava contains natural compounds that can release cyanide when broken down. Soaking for days lets these compounds break down and leach out, so the soaking period should not be shortened.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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