Food in Tanzania

Tanzanians eat a lot of meat. If you were to ask a Tanzanian man what he enjoys eating, he would reply, "Beef."

"What do you enjoy eating?"
"Beef."
"What else do you eat?"
"Maybe some ugali with a beef stew."

Ugali, or boiled cornmeal mush, is the primary staple of the entire Sub-Saharan African continent. It has different names in different places. In Tanzania, it is called ugali. If you have ever eaten polenta, an Italian starch, then you have eaten ugali. It is essentially the same thing. Tanzanians eat it either as the base for a meat stew, or as a side dish with virtually anything else. I spent nearly 5 weeks in mainland Tanzania, and not once did I ever see a local meal that did not include ugali.

As a side dish, ugali is served in a big bowl that everyone eats from family style. You can doctor it up with salt or pepper, if you have any, but the traditional way to eat it is straight up, with your fingers. Alternatively, you can dip your nyama choma into it.

Which brings us back to beef.  Nyama choma is Swahili for "grilled meat." But it can be either nyama n’gombe, grilled beef, or nyama kuku, grilled chicken (it’s mostly tourists who eat nyama kuku).

Beef nyama choma is just a slab of beef—any slab will do—that is slow cooked over a fire for about 45 minutes. They cook the meat until it is way past well done.  I mean that meat is seriously cooked! Once done, the meat is either sliced into bite sized morsels and served in a bowl with a side of ugali and grilled bananas, or everyone grabs their knife and slices off the meat as they desire.

The bananas are actually plantains, the starchy non-sweet cousin of the Safeway variety. They are peeled and thrown onto the fire along with the beef and go through the same agonizing torture.

Nyama choma can be a real treat, if you approach it with the right perspective. First of all, go to the dentist and have a real thorough check-up before eating nyama choma. Secondly, don’t try comparing it to anything you could get at "Mortons of Chicago".  Instead, an ideal time to try it for the first time is after climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, when you haven’t had fresh food for a week of camping in cold weather. After such an arduous trek, nothing else on earth will satisfy you in quite the same way—not even a prime rib from Mortons. There is something primeval about skewering a 4 pound slab of meat on a stick, cooking it on an open fire, and cutting it up with a Crocodile Dundee knife that satisfies you on some lower level.

Safari Food

This can vary dramatically, depending on which outfit you travel with. If you are going on a lodge safari, then you will eat at your lodge, otherwise, you will have a cook travelling with you. Either way, they tend to cater to the western palette.

For my safari, breakfast involved lots of fruit (sweet bananas, mangos, pineapples, avocados), eggs and potatoes, or pancakes. For drinks, coffee is invariably Sanka, so I would recommend the tea. We drank a lot of Chai Bora, which was the leading brand in Arusha.

On our mountaineering trips, lunch was usually soup, a cheese sandwich and more fruit. We never had onions for some strange reason, but we always had tomatoes and cucumbers.  Dinner started with more soup, and then chicken, spaghetti or more pancakes. During trekking safaris, it was important to carbo-load, so spaghetti and pancakes were important.

On game viewing safaris, you typically go out on a game drive before dawn, returning to camp for a late breakfast and a nap.  Consequently, lunch is not necessary.  After a lazy afternoon, you go out for a game drive at 4pm, and return to camp for dinner at about 7pm.  Dinner is chicken or beef in a sauce, with a side of ugali.

City Food

When we were in the cities, and not involved with our safari expeditions, we had to fend for ourselves. Breakfast was typically very Indian. Most places served chipatis (Indian pancakes) and samosas to go with your chai (tea). Alternatively, we found these delicious sweet rices balls that seemed to be deep-fried. They reminded me of a rice donut.

Lunch was usually very small and quick. I indulged in 2 or 3 samosas from a street vendor at 150 shillings ($0.20) per samosa, whereas Liz would buy a grilled cassava root for 200 shillings.

Dinner was quite a treat. Tanzania has a large Indian population, and we ate a lot of Indian food here. We rarely spent more than $15 on dinner for the two of us. This included lots of naan bread, some dal, some palak paneer and a curry dish. When we weren’t eating Indian, we were sitting at a bar, eating nyama choma for 2000 shillings per kilo (~ $1.20 per pound) and pounding Kilimanjaro Lagers.

Why is it that everywhere around the world, except the US, Chinese restaurants are high-end gourmet food? If you want to spend $20 per person on dinner, you could go to a Chinese restaurant in Tanzania. But why would you do that when you can eat like a king for a quarter of the price?

View my Arusha bar and restaurant recommendations here.

Beer

Lots to choose from here. The most popular brand depends on where you are. In and around Arusha, Kilimanjaro Lager was the choice. Kilimanjaro was a very mild beer, similar to Heineken or Amstel.  People seemed to drink a lot of Tusker (a Kenyan beer) in Zanzibar. But I didn’t care for it very much. It reminded me of Budweiser.

Beers should cost about 600 TSH ($0.90) at a grocery store, and 800 - 1000 TSH ($1.10 - $1.40) in a restaurant.

The other choices: Kibo Gold, which tasted a lot like Kilimanjaro, and Serengeti Lager, which was malt liquor at 8% alcohol. One bottle of that and I was done.

A Note On Street Food

Now, this is Africa. So street food may not be the wisest thing to eat in your first week on the continent. But after being in Africa for a couple of months, my wife and I were drinking the water without filtration. So, when it comes to street food, I would just say, "let the buyer beware." My wife and I spent 6 months travelling through Africa, the Mid-East and Southern Europe, and it wasn’t until we hit Istanbul—Europe!—that we had our first and only food poisoning experience.