For Eric Adjepong, sharing recipes from Ghana connects his cultural identity to his culinary journey

You may recognize Eric Adjepong from two seasons of Top Chef. We spoke to him back in 2023 about the release of his children's book, Sankofa, which focuses on culture and identity. Eric is starting 2025 with a new Washington, D.C. restaurant, Elmina, and a cookbook, Ghana to the World: Recipes and Stories That Look Forward While Honoring the Past.

Evan Kleiman: Hey, Eric, it's so great to have you back on the show again. 

Eric Adjepong: Thank you so much for having me. It's really good to be here. And yeah, exciting times.

You are first-generation Ghanaian American. How does that shape how you see the world? 

I gotta say, Evan, it's the bulk of my identity. It really is the foundation of how I see the world, and also how I have the world see me. I'm so lucky to have fallen into this industry and culinary arts and food and hospitality, because I think there's such a unique lens that folks from Ghana have with all three of those sort of scopes with food and how we celebrate food and our hospitality and our specific ways to offer people warmth and everything else like that. So I'm so blessed to be in this position, to have great parents and a great community you fall back on.

In Africa, black-eyed peas are a terrific source of protein and are used in all forms: ground, dried, fresh, and in stews like red red. Photo by Doaa Elkady.

Let's talk a little bit about your early life. You were born in New York, but you made your first trip back to Ghana pretty early, didn't you? How long did you stay those first years that you were back in Ghana? 

Yeah, formative years, honestly. I was there between two and six, so I have vague memories, but the ones that stick are pretty sharp and vivid. Even now in my adult age, I can remember a toy police car that I had in my grandparents' house that I played around with, and I remember the massive tree that was in front of their front yard. And I remember yelling out to street vendors for fried donuts. And these really, really important, sort of foundational memories all happened in Ghana.

I love that. Let's get to cooking from your book. Obviously, seasonings are building blocks that, in combination with a lot of ingredients, create signature flavor. What sauces and rubs and blends do you deem most essential to get us started? 

Curry powder is essential. A mix of some sort of peri peri pepper, which is indigenous to West Africa and Ghana, specifically. Again, those warm spices, so the cinnamon, the nutmeg, the clove. Those are really, really important to kind of have in your back pocket or in your pantry. 

My mom would mix a combination of paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, a little bit of fennel seed and dry parsley and sage, and kind of have a house seasoning that she would use on various proteins that just gave a unifying sort of flavor profile to a lot of the things that she cooked. Then, her hot sauce. She would blend tomato and peppers, scotch bonnet, and have a little bit of that hot sauce available as well. So it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and the combinations of all of them together, really was the framework that she colored in. 

"It's the bulk of my identity," says chef Eric Adejpong, of being a first-generation Ghanaian American. "It really is the foundation of how I see the world." Photo by Emmanuel Boakye-Appi.

Since I started learning about West African cuisines, I've always been intrigued by egusi seeds, which you see in a lot of different recipes for soups and stews. But you have a recipe for granola that uses them. Can you describe the flavor and what they add to granola?

For sure, yeah. So you called it, egusi, it comes from the indigenous melon in West Africa. Sort of harken it to a pepita, you know, a pumpkin seed. It's very, very earthy, very mellow, not the most flavor punch. But what does the trick really is the way it fills you up. It's a bunch of fiber. So when you blend it and you add it into stews, now you can imagine, sort of feeding a family with something very inexpensive, and now you can really fill them up with something nutritionally dense. 

For the granola itself, I just take it back to the Pepita seed and add that into a mix of oats and other dried fruit. What's so nice about the recipe book is that there's two different sides of the book. There's traditional recipes. So you would see something where an egusi seed is used traditionally, and then something that I've taken to liberty and stretched the limits of what that ingredient or that dish might look like. 

Tell me how banku differs from fufu and what your preference is. And then what are we dipping it in, if we are?

Oh yeah, good question. So fufu is, depending on where you are in the country or even in the region, a combination of cassava and plantain, steamed cassava, steamed plantain, green plantain. So unripe, not a lot of sugar content. It is steamed and then pounded to a very, very soft, supple sort of texture. Creates a vessel. You can create it as a vessel to pick up your stews and your soups. Similar to pasta or rice, it now becomes the starch, the carbohydrate, the main sort of backbone to a lot of the dishes, and I love it. 

Banku is very, very similar in swallow texture. But what's different is that it's made with cornmeal and corn flour, and it's fermented. So you take the cornmeal corn flour, you let it sit in water for a few days, and it creates a little bit of a starter that is then pounded and steamed. You have this amazing sort of tang to the swallow. And again, same thing you use that, you break a little bit of that piece off with your hands, and then you go ahead and sort of just attack whatever is in front of you with the with the banku or fufu. 

I love banku. I really do. It's one of my favorite things to eat with. Traditionally, it's eaten with your hands, and there's a beautiful ceremony of hand washing that goes along with it. When you're eating without utensils, there's an immediacy to how you understand the food, and your brain sort of has this beautiful connection with the food that most of the time gets stolen with utensils. There's a barrier between your hand and the food. 

Along with Elmina, his new restaurant, Eric Adejpong, delivers a new cookbook, "Ghana to The World," each celebrating his roots. Photo courtesy of Clarkson Potter.

I love that. That is the best description of eating with your hands I've ever heard. I love that. 

I appreciate it. 

You mentioned in the book that you could eat your weight in plantains, and I don't think you're alone in that. I love the recipe you have for them. What do you add to the sweet fried plantains that makes it yours?

The sweet fried plantains is, I gotta say, one of my favorite dishes in the book. The fried sweet plantains, in and of themselves, inherently, are just very, very sweet once they get ripe and the skin gets nice and dark, almost black, the sugar content just shoots through the roof. So we fried this sweet plantain. 

I bumped into this amazing group called Keepwell here in the States, and they do this benne seed miso. When I saw it, my eyes opened up like so, so wide. Benin is a country, the neighbor in Ghana. They had the benne seed, nutty, earthy. They turned that into a miso. And when I saw that man, it was like Eureka moments, pairing it with the sweet plantains and a little bit of onion that are caramelized. So adding more depth of sweetness but still not overpowering, was the first thing that came to my mind. Just loaded with umami and loaded with natural sweetness. So honestly, you let nature do its job, and the rest of the dish is taken care of.

Love that. Tell me a little bit about the stewed turkey wings. The photograph makes them look so delicious.

The stewed turkey wings, I have to thank my auntie Agatha, who pioneered the dish. It's a popular one, but I don't eat it often if it's not made by my aunt. I adore her, and I had to do some digging and some pleading and a little bribing to get this recipe from her to add to the book. 

You sort of boil and then fry. There's a two step process with that, and then it's added with this beautiful stew with tomato. There's green seasoning that's added to it, a little bit of habanero, and the stew is just, it's absolutely delicious. So yeah, she made that dish maybe every other Sunday. I remember it was a pretty special time, because getting turkey wings is difficult. It was difficult, at least when I was growing up, so it wasn't an everyday dish, but when she made it was very, very special.

Well, how wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm really happy that you joined us, and it's a very beautiful book. Thank you. 

Thank you so much. Evan, it's really great to talk to you again. I can talk to you forever. I feel like you ask such amazing questions and I really, really enjoy our time together.