Shito Is the Ghanaian Spicy, Sweet, Powerful Pepper Sauce I Put on Everything

My mum is Irish and my dad’s Ghanaian. That makes me a third-culture child. While I was born to a Ghanaian father, I spent the majority of my childhood holidays in Ireland with my mother’s family—all our summer and Easter vacations were spent building treehouses in rural West Cork, digging potatoes in my grandfather’s small field, and collecting mussels from the beach at Bantry Bay. I’m pretty sure we were the only Black kids from South London playing “little house on the Irish prairie” in the mid-80s.

Back in the polluted, dank, concrete metropolis of South London, my dad sometimes brought home what seemed like weird and wonderful Ghanaian ingredients I had never been formally introduced to. Often he bought them to cook for himself, and he didn’t seem to understand why I would be interested to know what they were. I’d have to press him to gather as much information as I could.

I must have been around seven or eight years old when he first brought home a jar of shito. I examined the tar-colored, chile-specked oil, whose pungent aroma pricked my nostrils with heavy heat and filled the whole kitchen. I was moved through that aroma to a new place—and a new obsession.

“Shit-oh?” I asked.

“Yes, shitor.”

“Sheee-toe?”

“Yes, shitor.”

“But Dad, shit…”

Shito (also called shitor) is a famous Ghanaian hot chile condiment, akin to a relish, with a deep, earthy, smoky, fishy flavor. It can be made in a variety of ways, and every household has its own recipe. The condiment goes beautifully with both fish and meat, and can be served as a side to most dishes. It can also be used for marinating or as a dressing, dip, spread, or topping.

Part of the joy of eating shito as a child was being able to untwist its child-unfriendly cap, which made it feel like contraband. The strength required made accessing the black gold an adventure in and of itself—the threat of dark, smoky fish oil dripping all over my and my school uniform only added to the buzz. Be careful, my mum would caution.

I ate it secretly—fearful of reprimand from Dad for eating all his shito. I would take quiet dollops, little boulders balancing delicately on the edge of a teaspoon before being spread like calligraphy ink across my plate. I didn't care what I put it on—I just had a mind for eating as much of this stuff as possible, on whatever I could. Cheese on toast, rice and stew, fish and chips. Crisp sandwiches for packed lunch. It must have oozed out of my pores while I was at primary school.

We ate hot and extra-hot shito—never mild—in glass jars labeled “Ghana’s Best,” a phrase I was proud to be associated with: That mysterious land and its finest things had me in rapture.

I’ve since learned that Ghana’s Best is not in fact owned by Ghanaians—but I’ve also learned a lot more about shito. After spending my 20s in a shito drought while living in Brighton, on the south coast of England, I returned to London, and shito came back into my diet and my imagination. I was lucky to live near Ridley Road market in Dalston, East London. Ridley Road is like a little West Africa, with heaped stalls of Asanka pots, African fabrics, halal butchers with piles of tripe, and fishmongers with catfish and tilapia and land snails writhing around in buckets on the pavement. One side of the market is dedicated predominantly to Ghana, the other to Nigeria, Senegal, and Cameroon. As I started to build my food business, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, I became a frequent shopper. And I got an education from the “aunties” I was not related to about the ingredients and flavors outside of my dad’s repertoire that Ghana had to offer.

Ridley Road was where I bought my jarred shito. But that’s not the only shito that was available there: In Ghana, shito is a catch-all for any type of heat-giving chile or spice. At Ridley Road, when I first found a bright-green, cherry-sized, innocent-looking little chile, I was excited: What is it called? What is it used for? What does it taste like? But it soon became apparent that, language barriers aside, the ladies of Ridley Road knew only one word for chile—and that was shito. I later learned that the bright-green pepper was called kpakpo shito, but I still wanted to know more. Ghanaian cuisine uses such a wide variety of chiles, with each adding its distinctive flavor to different dishes—sweet, smoky, spicy—and I wanted to understand each of these wonderful sources of spice. In 2013, after I’d begun a supper club in London and was doing research for a cookbook, I went home to Accra to investigate.

A brief introduction to a few of the key ingredients you need to capture the flavors in her cookbook, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen.

My aunt Evelyn kindly took me to Kaneshie Market, in Accra. Kaneshie Market is something else. When you arrive, the first thing that hits you is a powerful aroma that comes from wele, or raw cow hide—a local delicacy so popular that leather factories struggle to find enough hides for mass production. At the center of the market is a huge, yellow, multilevel structure from the 1970s, surrounded on all sides by small colorful stalls and carts and general mayhem. “Plenty fish o!” declared Evelyn, proudly shrugging her shoulders and adjusting her bag strap. Seafood dominated the outside market—smoked and fresh fishes included herring, salmon, barracuda, cassava fish, red snapper, catfish, tilapia, prawns, blue crabs—spreading inward along and across the vast ground floor toward vegetables, shea butter, and hair products. This is where the haggle happens. It’s a real-deal African experience to be in the midst of it: You can hear Fante, Twi, Ga, and Akan all clashing in the air from tongues moving as fast as money is exchanged.

As I stood in the clamor and heat and hot smell, even with Evelyn by my side speaking in Twi and Ga, few women had much to say as I held up chiles of all shapes and sizes. They were all just “shito.” Still seeking answers, I turned to Google, and a limited number of African cookbooks and blogs available at the time. This added a new wrinkle: trying to figure out which tribes in Ghana called which chile by which local name. My persistent inquiries among my family, and with Ghanaian market traders both in London and Accra, allowed me to create a list of sorts: I learned what was Scotch bonnet, what was grains of selim, and alligator pepper, cubeb, kpakpo shito, and bird’s-eye chile. It’s no doubt incomplete, but I shared the list in my cookbook, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen.

Three of these kinds of peppers—grains of selim, cubeb, and Scotch bonnet—go into my own recipe for shito, which also contains dried chile flakes. I eat shito with almost everything, but especially love it as a spicy addition to a cheese board with other chutneys and relishes. I sometimes add a teaspoon or two to soups and stocks to build depth. Sometimes it becomes a marinade for grilled prawns, roast chicken, or baby back ribs, and it makes a banging spicy mayo I call Crayonaise. And next time you have fish and chips—like my recipe for West African fish and chips here? Ghana-fy that plate with some shito.

Many of my restaurant customers who were new to Ghanaian cuisine likened it to the Malaysian condiment sambal belacan—the two preparations share the same rich texture and funky seafood notes. If you can’t find the smoked prawn or crayfish powder called for in this recipe, shrimp paste is a good substitute. It’s worth noting that despite my childhood arrogance about heat, I’ve come to understand that spice should be treated like any other seasoning—adjusted according to your taste. A great deal of chiles go into the recipe below, but feel free to use less to suit your palate. (You can also make it coarser or smoother, depending on your preference.) I’ve made this recipe a little fancy with the addition of rum-soaked apricots, but you can skip that part and end up with a perfect solid shito. The condiment will keep up to a week in the fridge, with a generous amount of oil helping preserve it—but it doesn’t usually last that long in my house.

Drunk Apricot Shito (Ghanaian Hot Pepper Sauce)

Papaya-and-Cubeb-Marinated Snapper With Baked Yam Chips

Originally Appeared on Epicurious