Ablo is a traditional Togolese corn cake. It’s made by steaming some paste and comes out as as kind of a dumpling like cake. The farmers of Atti-Apedokoe grow plenty of maize but they don’t always get great yields these days. So they attended a training session offered by staff at the Institut Togolais de Recherche Agronomique (ITRA) and learned how to make ablo out of sorghum.
It’s not just a matter of substituting maize flour for sorghum flour. The farmers of that part of Togo don’t traditionally grown sorghum so they needed to learn how to cultivate it. But the yields will no doubt impress them since sorghum can cope better with marginal, and often saline, soils, which maize struggles with.
Kpogli Akpene was an early adopter with the sorghum-based ablo. She showed me how she makes it by scooping the paste onto bits of plastic and then steaming it for 10 minutes. I sampled both the maize and sorghum ablos. I can’t say which one I liked better as they are different. The sorghum was slightly sweeter. Somedays you might want a sweet ablo and other days not. Now the farmers have the option of using maize or sorghum depending on availability.
