Kiano Moju blends African flavors and California vibes in a new cookbook

During the week, Kiano Moju would eat Pop-Tarts, bean and cheese burritos, and maybe some takeout from a nearby restaurant — typical American fare. On the weekends, her family might enjoy ugali, a Kenyan dish that's similar to grits, or Nigerian jollof rice, or the sautéed collard greens known as sukuma wiki or moin moin (steamed bean cakes).

Born to a Kenyan mother and a Nigerian father and raised in Northern California, Kiano grew up with roots in multiple cultures. She parlayed her love of cooking into a successful career as a creator of recipe videos for Buzzfeed. Now, she has melded her African heritage and California vibes into a cookbook… AfriCali: Recipes from My Jikoni.

She also founded the Jikoni Recipe Archive, a nonprofit organization that documents African cuisine across its diaspora.

Evan Kleiman: I love that you got interested in cooking from a pretty young age. Can you tell us how that happened and who guided you?

Kiano Moju: My mother nurtured the interest. She is someone who cooks out of necessity, not out of joy. Once she saw me being curious and wanting to hang out in the kitchen with her, she was like, "Okay, someone will teach you cooking but it's not gonna be me." She put me in a cooking camp when I was six or seven years old.

That's incredible. 

Yeah, it was fun. It was incredibly informal. It was in Berkeley, in the East Bay area. The first camp I did, these two ladies, they had a house and they just taught us. I think it was pretty international food. I was so young, the only thing I remember distinctly making was agua fresca.

I love that. Like so many people who are the children of immigrants or who are immigrants themselves, you grew up with multiple identities that you hold. I wonder how that shaped your perception of food and your approach to cooking.

I think having parents from two different countries, not just two different countries, but opposite corners of the African continent, the food I grew up with was vastly ranged. My mom's family are pastoralists, so my grandparents have a ranch where we raise cows, goats, sheep, chicken. My dad's family in Nigeria grew up alongside a river and I tell you, if I bring seafood into my mother's family's house, they want it out. No one wants to hear about it, they don't want to see it. 

All the cuisines, whether it's from my heritage or the foods that grew up in the East Bay area, they've always been present. I think as I was learning how to cook, the intermarrying between certain ingredients or certain flavor combinations was very natural because I was cooking what I was around and what was new to me. It maybe wasn't until I started professionally writing recipes, I started isolating and picking things apart about what comes from where.

I feel like everyone who decides they're going to write a cookbook has different motives, different ideas of what they want from the experience of writing it. What was the goal of the cookbook for you?

Having come from such a mixed, cultured background, and then now professionally working in food, I was asked pretty frequently, what is my culinary identity? What type of food do you cook? I never had anything concrete to refer people to. It was always a little list. I'm like, it's a bit of this and a bit of that. AfriCali as a book is kind of my answer to it. 

It puts the flavors I grew up with, from my heritage and from the Bay, all into something together. The biggest and most important thing for me was to really focus on those African flavors that are accessible and I can put into my everyday cooking, and sharing that for folks as we talk about Third Culture folks, folks who really are either interested or grew up with those foods but don't necessarily want it to feel so far away and distant. 

Where does the California-ness come into it? California cuisine can mean so many things. Can you give us an example in a recipe where we can see California within your construct?

I think the California-ness is two things. One is the cultures that we have here in the state, especially for me, growing up in the East Bay. I was very lucky that we ate globally on a regular basis because that was the food around us so some of the recipes take that influence. 

I have a Thai-style green curry that I grew up having, they would always put squash in it. Squash is one of those vegetables that I greatly detest cutting. It is such a pain. I have a hurdle in my mind — do I really want to go and chop that? But then I was thinking, what brings a similar flavor? I always have plantain in my house, it's my favorite food, so substituting something like that, putting green plantains in the curry that I grew up loving, is a way that shows up in the book, but it's also California. 

We're an agricultural state, we love produce. So it's looking at some of those heavier dishes, especially from the West African side, and figuring out more ways to incorporate produce. Or can I have little toppings and condiments that lighten and brighten those dishes?

Flavor-forward spices are balanced with coconut milk in a chickpea curry. Photo by Kristin Teig.

I love your peri peri fried mushrooms. Tell us about the origins of peri peri and how you use it with this dish.

Peri peri just means chili, it just means spicy. We like to say it twice so you don't forget. It originates from the Swahili term pilipili, which also means spicy chili. That origin is a product of colonialism, because chilies came from the Americas and were brought over, in this case, the peri peri chili by the Portuguese to Southern Africa. 

That bird's eye chili, it has some fire and it has a real kick to it. Crispy mushrooms, mushrooms in general, are a big part of what I shop in my regular groceries, so thinking of how I can use that spice for a fun little snack, like those fried mushrooms, which are in a very airy batter, kind of like a beer batter, it's a great way to incorporate that chili in something that has really built itself as an iconic dish from Southern Africa into a fun snack.

Mmmmm, my mouth is actually watering.

I know but it's not for the lighthearted night. I intentionally did that because I personally can handle my chili medium. If a food is spicy, I like for it to look spicy, so you know what you're in for. When you look at those mushrooms, you know they're going to be hot.

For 30 years, as long as I had my restaurant, every day I was making potato croquettes. I have great fondness for croquettes of all kinds, so I'm intrigued by your Mukimo Croquettes. What is mukimo? And how have you updated it?

It's a classic Kenyan dish. Those who probably grew up in the Kenyan school system see it as a school food, as well. I spent a lot of summers in Kenya [when I was] growing up, so it was one of those love/hate dishes. It's mashed potatoes with... it's like a green leaf. Some people use leaves from different pumpkins and squashes. I use spinach because it's what we have most available. It has pieces of cooked maize. That's another new world ingredient that is a really strong presence in Kenyan cooking. So it's green mashed potatoes with maize, and the pieces of maize tormented me as a child.

I need to ask you, when you say maize, are you talking about a type of corn that isn't as sweet as what we're familiar with?

Exactly. It was big, it's full, usually sold in the full ears of the maize, but it's that harder, larger kernel. It's not sweet corn, where you have to cook it for a very, very long time, otherwise it will stay quite hard.

So interesting. 

It's a staple. My grandmother always had a big storehouse of maize on her ranch.

Did you decide to substitute the maize in your dish?

Absolutely. Maize here, in that form, is pretty hard to get your hands on but also very time-intensive to cook. I feel like people get impatient with it and just thinking of a creamy mashed potato with hard little chunks of corn in it was not fun for me today or when I was a kid, so I substitute them with frozen peas. They bring in that same sweetness but they require basically no additional cooking. You still get that balance of flavor without all the labor of cooking down a whole year of maize.

Could you talk a bit about East African curries and how they differ from the curries of Thailand and India?

Curries, particularly in eastern Africa, you're going to find those on the coast. Kenya sits on the Indian Ocean so there's a huge spice trade influenced by India and the Middle East. Those curries, they're going to have those very forward spices that are balanced out by coconut milk but also have a really strong presence of aromatics, which you would find a lot in Thai-style curries. So it's gonna be a lot of garlic, a lot of ginger, and those two play together. The spices are there but maybe not as forward as an Indian style curry.

And you do one that is chickpeas in coconut sauce.

I use chickpeas but you can use lentils or beans, where you have this gentle spiced coconut sauce with loads of aromatics. Really, the main thing with that curry is a pairing. You have to serve it with warm flatbread. We like using chapati but it's that combination of having something cozy yet saucy enough that you can dip your bread into. It's that experience together that makes the curry really special.

In AfriCali, you have three separate recipes involving ugali. Can you explain what it is and pick one recipe to focus on, maybe the Sukuma Wiki with ugali.

It's so funny, I didn't even notice that ugali appears 80,000 times but I don't think I ever give a recipe for it because it's one of those things that are so like, "Put cornmeal in water and you have ugali." It's so straightforward. But Sukuma Wiki is sauteed collard greens. It is everyday food. In a Kenyan household, you will find this cooked a couple times a week, minimum.

The thing I like about it is that, for a lot of American collard green preparation in the South, they love to cook it for hours and boil it and it takes time. Unfortunately, in California, people like to serve it raw in a wrap, which I personally could never eat raw collard greens, but it's what we do here. So this is kind of an in-between where you remove the stalks from the collard greens, cut them very fine, almost like a chiffonade, and saute them in a little bit of garlic, ginger, and tomato. Once you figure that you don't need to do too much to your greens to make them delicious, it's pretty hard to not get hooked. Ugali is the perfect pairing because it's simple. The whole point of it is, nothing's complicated, nothing's fussy. It's just cornmeal. My littles put it in a taco.

"AfriCali: Recipes from My Jikoni" answers the questions recipe developer Kiano Moju gets regarding her cultural identity. Photo courtesy of Simon & Schuster, LLC.