Tanzanian cuisine is not something I have heard of outside of it’s borders and it’s probably not something I expect to hear about either. The food is pretty plain and the staples are grilled meat (nyama choma) and ugali (a staple starch made from maize or maize flour).

 

There being not much in the way of restaurants, the lodges where we stayed at provided most of the cuisine we ate, apart from up the mountain, where John the cook managed to produce vast quantities of tasty food with the absolute minimum of equipment, including a bewildering array of soups (courgette, vegetable, okra, sweet potato, cucumber, carrot to name a few).

 

Due to the presumably unappetising taste of Ugali (the closest I’ve had is grits in the Southern USA and that is a pretty lamentable dish), the chefs in the lodges seemed keen to replace it with as many carbohydrates as possible, giving rise to having mashed potato and rice on the same plate (see above & right) or pasta and roast potatoes. I’m sure that would have been fine if I’d been attempting a marathon the next day, but the carb overload was a bit much at times. Most of the grilled meats were fine, but where the chef’s really started to shine was when they made use of the local spices to make curry style dishes. Cardomom’s, cinnamon bark, peppercorns, coconut milk and chillies were all put to excellent use, usually with beef or vegetables.

 

Pemba is one of the Spice Islands and has been a port of call for traders ever since they were able to traverse the vast stretches of land and water to get there. Due to it being an island, seafood is obviously a main ingredient and the fresh BBQ’d lobster was one of the best I have had. The only variety of fish they seemed to serve was white snapper, which had quite firm, meaty flesh, not unlike tuna. Unfortunately, the lodge where we stayed attempted to provide lots of Western style dishes, occasionally in a fusion with local dishes, which mostly were pretty bad (cold spaghetti salad with papaya was a classic one!). They also seemed to grill an awful lot of pork, considering that the island is 90% Muslim and there were no pigs to be seen anywhere! When they did make use of the local spices and made local dishes, the food was of much higher quality and I had a couple of excellent beef & seafood curries.

 

So, not a place to go if you’re looking for a new food experience, but the islands (Pemba and Zanzibar) do have great fresh seafood.