Captivating, versatile and rich with meaning, okra is an intrepid citizen of the world

Quiabos Tostados com Pimenta — Brazililan Chargrilled Okra with Chile

By Leslie Brenner

Simmer it in a savory gumbo. Capture it in a pickle. Roast it to show off its depth. It’s the height of okra season, and there are endless delicious ways to treat the fascinating, polarizing pod.

You can shallow-fry it as Indian-spiced rounds that highlight its captivating geometry. Halve it lengthwise and grill it to smoky goodness. Cook it with tomatoes and onions, stir in olive oil and herbs and serve it as a tangy, cool Levantine salad.

Food historians disagree about okra’s origins. Most, including Jessica B. Harris (author of The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent), pin it as Africa. “The mucilaginous pod is the continent’s culinary totem,” she writes. “From the bamia of Egypt to the soupikandia of Senegal, passing by the various sauces gombos and more, this pod is used in virtual continent-wide totality.” Others say it comes from South Asia or Southeast Asia.

What’s indisputable is that okra has long since become a citizen of the world.

In Asia, it appears in various guides from India to Vietnam to Japan. A sour fish soup from Vietnam, canh chua cá, features okra, tamarind and pineapple. The late Shizuo Tsuji gave a recipe for okura wasabi-jōyu — a simple okra salad with wasabi, soy sauce and mirin — in his landmark 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. And in India, okra is popular quick-fried till crispy.

Crispy Sumac Okra from Anjali Pathak’s ‘The Indian Family Kitchen’

Intrigued? Try this crunchy, addictive version of Crispy Sumac Okra, adapted from Anjali Pathak’s The Indian Family Kitchen.

In Africa, Egypt has bamia (okra made sweet and sour with honey and lemon); Ethiopia has bamya alich’a (okra simmered with tomatoes, onions, garlic and spices); Benin has sauce bombo (okra simmered with tomatoes and chile, served on rice); and Nigeria has akara awon (bean-and-okra fritters). Recipes for all four, and more, can be found in Harris’ The Africa Cookbook.

Out of Africa, okra dishes appear all over the Levant, and in Afghanistan, Armenia and Kurdistan. In Turkey, okra are dried and later made into a soup, banya corbasi. Lebanon is home to a lamb and okra stew called bamya bel lameh, and also a delightful braised okra and tomato dish served cool or room temp, as part of a mezze — bamieh bi zeit. Glossy with olive oil, it’s particularly nice this time of year, as tomatoes and okra are both in high season. Claudia Roden offers a wonderful version in her classic 2006 book Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon. Our adaptation takes her up on her suggested variation of using tangy pomegranate vinegar in place of sugar in the recipe.

Bamieh Bi Zeit — Lebanese Okra and Tomato, served cold as a salad

And then there are all the African diasporic dishes. These are the okra dishes that, over the centuries, have become extraordinarily meaningful for the communities descended from enslaved people, from South America to the Caribbean to the United States.

READ: “Okra, now at peak season, may be the most meaningful and expressive vegetable for this singular American moment”

In the American South, okra appears in gumbos and other soups and stews — often with tomatoes (as in Lebanon and all over the Levant) and/or shrimp. BJ Dennis, a Charleston, South Carolina chef with roots in the low country Gullah-Geechee community, has a magnificent recipe for Okra & Shrimp Purloo in Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, edited and curated by Bryant Terry and published last year. From Dennis’ headnote:

“Okra is a vegetable that is dear to many of us throughout the African diaspora. And of course there’s shrimp, which is vital to our culture. This is a dish of pain, resilience and celebration. It’s the story of our existence in the so-called New World. If you were to give me one final meal to eat, it would be this.”

BJ Dennis’ Purloo with Okra & Shrimp, from ‘Black Food,’ edited and curated by Bryant Terry

Recently Dennis helped the International African American Museum (slated to open in January 2023) develop a Gullah-inspired menu; the cafe, Dennis tells me, expected to open the following year. Meanwhile, here’s our adaptation of his marvelous recipe, which also features Carolina Gold rice, another low country food with deep meaning for Gullah-Geechee’s descendants of enslaved people.

Okra pods go by the name molondrones in the Dominican Republic, where they’re eaten as a stew (guisado de molondrones) or salad. Guisados starring okra are also popular in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where the vegetable is called quimbombó.

From Brazil comes salada da quiabo, an okra salad, and caruru — a shrimp and okra stew. The state of Bahia is known for the dish; in Pará — the country’s northernmost state — caruru is a shrimp and okra curry. There’s a delicious-looking recipe for it in Thiago Castanho’s 2014 book Brazilian Food. “The origins of caruru point to a divided authorship between native Indians and Africans,” writes Castanho in the headnote. “This typical dish of Bahia state is nowadays associated with the African-Brazilian religious ritual, Candomblé, and served as a main course, as here, or as part of a banquet.”

I haven’t yet cooked or tasted a traditional caruru, but I recently had the pleasure of tasting a fabulous spin at Meridian, a spectacular modern Brazilian restaurant in Dallas (which happens to be a client of my consulting business).

Grilled Jumbo Prawn Caruru from Meridian, a modern Brazilian restaurant in Dallas, Texas

In his Grilled Jumbo Prawn Caruru, Meridian’s executive chef, Junior Borges — who is from Brazil, near Rio de Janeiro — featured okra all kinds of ways: braised in the sauce, halved lengthwise and charred to top, raw as little round okra exclamation points. It was an okra tour de force — served with a Carolina Gold rice cake that’s deep-fried and dusted with ramp powder.

Chef Borges told me, when he featured the dish recently, that caruru has “deep meaning” for him and his family.

Much simpler than either chef Borges’ or Castanho’s caruru — and unlike those, a snap to prepare at home — is Quiabos Tostados com Pimenta (chargrilled okra with chile). Our adaptation is also from Castanho’s Brazilian Food. To make it, drizzle whole okra pods with olive oil, char them on a grill-pan, season them with aviú (tiny Brazilian dried salted shrimp) or other dried salt shrimp, plus thinly sliced fresh red chiles, lime juice and cilantro.

It’s absolutely transporting. And I love chef Castanho’s suggestion that if you can’t find aviú or other dried shrimp, you can use katsuobushi — Japanese bonito flakes — instead. The katsuobushi adds a similar aquatic umami note, while incontrovertibly proving that okra is, by any measure, a well traveled, adaptable, flexible, deliciously versatile citizen of the world.

---

Did you enjoy this story? You might also like:

READ: Okra, now at peak season, may be the most meaningful and expressive vegetable for this singular American moment

MORE OKRA RECIPES from Cooks Without Borders:

RECIPE: Shrimp Sauté with Texas Vegetables

RECIPE: Marcus Samuelsson’s Spicy Okra

RECIPE: Charred Okra with a Little Spice

RECIPE: Shrimp, Andouille Sausage and Okra Gumbo

RECIPE: Sweet Home Café’s Spicy Pickled Okra

All the harvest-box greens: How to make the most of kale, chard, collards and the like

Harvest boxes of greens and herbs from La Bajada POP Farm, part of Promise of Peace Gardens, a Dallas-based nonprofit.

Whether it’s from your own garden, the community garden where you’ve been working a plot, the farmers market — or you’ve picked up or ordered a harvest box from a local farm — you suddenly find yourself with armfuls of greens.

I love greens any way I can get them; this time of year and through the winter, I actively crave them. I especially love mustard greens, for their wonderful spiciness, but kale, chard, collards and spinach are wonderful too — and I love to mix them up.

What to do with them?

Sure, you can drop the leaves in a salad. For that, the youngest leaves are best — especially spinach and tangy beet greens. For tougher customers, like kale, a little pre-salad-bowl massage does wonders for mature leaves. Stack them, roll up and slice into chiffonade, then give those ribbons a squeeze before you dress them.

This time of year, soup is front-of-mind. You could make an earthy, vegan, soul-sustaining, feed-you-all-week soup based on lentils, onions, carrot and celery, punctuated by spices and rounded out by all those greens — thrown in at the last minute for maximum flavor and texture.

Here’s a master recipe.

And then there is saag paneer. Did you think the Indian braised greens-and-cheese dish was meant only to include spinach? Actually, in India saag refers to any kinds of greens, as Maneet Chauhan explains in her new cookbook, Chaat. (Read our story about it.) Her version of the classic dish includes kale and arugula along with spinach, but in her headnote she urges inclusion of any greens you’ve got.

Or you could shine a bright spotlight on the greens themselves, making a simple sauté that puts them center stage and celebrates their individual flavors.

During The Great Confinement, Wylie has fashioned himself into the greens specialist of our household. As long as chard (his favorite) is involved, it’s his mission to preside over them and add whatever else looks great. The stems, he feels, are all important. “You’re wasting if you don’t use them,” he says. “That’s not cool. They add texture and emphasize the character of each green. Especially chard.” He slices them into what looks like a small dice, and advocates sautéeing those stems with “some kind of allium,” which for him always includes shallots.

The sautéed stems also give the finished dish a confetti-on-top kind of beauty.

Last week, we purchased a harvest box from a wonderful nonprofit educational farm where we live in Dallas – Promise of Peace Gardens — and we found ourselves in possession of a wealth of gorgeous organic greens: two kinds of kale, rainbow chard and daikon greens.

Kale from our POP Gardens harvest box, with more greens in the background

I convinced Wylie to slow down enough to show me exactly how he achieves his greens greatness.

It starts with sweating shallots in olive oil, then adding garlic, then the toughest sliced stems, then the more tender stems, and then the greens — beginning with the sturdiest (kale and collards, for instance). You add them, and cook till wilted enough to make room for the next batch. Then come the more tender — chard, mustard and/or turnip. And finally the most tender – young arugula, spinach and whatnot. After that, he adds a little chicken broth (vegetable broth or water work fine, too, and keep it vegan), to loosen up the the mix and let it breathe. Finally, off-heat, a dash of vinegar.

They’re super delicious on those evenings when a pot of beans and some brown rice or roasted sweet potatoes feel like healthy luxuries. For omnivores, they’re the perfect minerally counterpoint to something like saucy pork chops, or any kind of roasted or braised meat or poultry. (Duck!)

There you go. If you’ve been hesitating to subscribe to a local farm-box program for fear you’d be awash in stuff you couldn’t use, you have your braising orders.

RECIPE: Sunday Souper Soup

RECIPE: Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer

RECIPE: Wylie’s Greens

Shrimp and grits from Marcus Samuelsson's new 'The Rise' is the best we've ever eaten. Ever.

I’ve eaten my share of shrimp and grits in my time. OK, maybe more than my share. As a longtime newspaper food editor, then a restaurant critic for 8 years, I’ve eaten more than my share of everything.

Among all those shrimp and all those many grits, the best rendition I’ve ever eaten — by far — was one I prepared in my own kitchen just last week. The credit goes to Marcus Samuelsson, in whose new cookbook — The Rise — I found the awesome recipe.

I’m in process of cooking my way through the book in order to write a review, but I wanted to share the dish with you while okra is still in season (it will likely end very soon). The recipe — which Samuelsson calls “Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits” — was inspired by, and serves as an homage to, Ed Brumfield, executive chef of Red Rooster, Samuelsson’s restaurant in Harlem.

Most of the shrimp and grits I’ve eaten have been a basic low-country style, the shrimp poached in a rich gravy and spooned over cheesy grits. Toni Tipton-Martin sheds valuable light on the history of the dish and its styles in her much lauded (and wonderful) book Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking:

“Shrimp and grits are everywhere on restaurant menus, but harder to find in African American cookbooks unless you know what you’re looking for: The historian Arturo Schomburg called it ‘breakfast shrimp with hominy.’ In Gullah-Geechee parlance, it’s gone by names like shrimp gravy or smuttered shrimp. Casual Louisiana Creoles might call it breakfast shrimp with tomatoes.”

It is the more tomatoey, Creole direction Samuelsson takes for the dish in The Rise; it includes a small dice of okra, as well. The lively sauce, smoky with paprika and spicy with cayenne, is bright and piquant enough to beautifully balance those cheesy, rich grits. (Are you hungry yet?) It’s much like a quick shrimp gumbo served on grits.

My favorite shrimp and grits ever is not difficult to make. It calls for fish stock (we used shrimp stock, a substitution that’s acknowledged in our adaptation of the recipe). Because we’re in the habit of buying shrimp in the shell and freezing the shells for the purpose, we were able to whip up a quick shell stock before making it; you’ll find the method toward the end of our shrimp, andouille sausage and gumbo recipe. I suspect purchased low-sodium chicken broth would also work, as would clam juice diluted in with water and chicken broth in a 2:1:1 proportion.

Though I used fresh okra, as the recipe specifies, if you can’t find fresh, I also suspect frozen would work fine. (I like to buy an extra pound of beautiful okra during the season, which I trim and freeze in a zipper bag, just to have for such moments. It freezes beautifully, so if you do see it, consider grabbing some extra.) Just let it thaw before you dice it.

If you make this dish, I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. I could even imagine, if okra is still around then, making it the centerpiece of a Black Food MattersThanksgiving dinner.

RECIPE: Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits

What to make this first fall weekend: a big pot of shrimp, andouille sausage and okra gumbo

With okra at peak season where we live, in Texas, we’ve been cooking it all kinds of ways lately.

One of our favorites is gumbo. Making this one — featuring Gulf shrimp, smoked andouille sausage and okra — starts with a stock made from the shells of the shrimp that will later go into the gumbo (along with some dried shrimp you can pick up at an Asian supermarket or buy online).

A long-and-slow-cooked roux gives it depth and body, and we roast the okra before adding it near the end, to concentrate flavor and mitigate slipperiness.

The recipe is very forgiving, and much easier than you might think. Serve it with rice; white rice is traditional, but we also love it with brown rice. Filé (Native American sassafras powder) and Louisiana hot sauce on the table are a must!

RECIPE: Shrimp, andouille sausage and okra gumbo

Okra, now at peak season, may be the most meaningful and expressive vegetable for this singular American moment

Last September, Leah Penniman, a food sovereignty activist and author of Farming While Black, gave a talk at Harvard Divinity School on “African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice.” In it, she reportedly told the story of her great, great grandmother. About to be kidnapped from her home in West Africa, she made a “really audacious and courageous decision” to gather the seeds of okra and other crops and braid them into her hair.

“They knew that wherever they were going,” Penniman explained, “they believed there would be a future of tilling and reaping on the soil, and there would be some seed we all needed to inherit. That’s what our grandmothers did for us.”

In so many ways, okra is the vegetable for the moment.

A person’s reaction to it — and relationship to it — speaks volumes about their identity.

“Okra is the food of my ancestors, who were pulled from their homes in Africa,” writes Kayla Stewart in an essay recently published on Medium. “It was grown by those enslaved along the Carolinas, and devoured by them in Louisiana. Okra is a constant in my familial story — one that includes deep memories and gaping holes of history.”

Ask a white person about okra, and you’ll likely get something a good deal less deep — maybe “I like it, as long as it’s not slimy.”

Because it is so important in Black American cooking, and also shows up in cuisines from around the world, it’s hard to think of an ingredient that’s more ideally suited as a place for Americans of all cultures to meet — especially anyone who strives for deeper understanding of Black foodways.

“People tend either to love or hate okra, which originated in Africa and spread to Arabia, Europe, the Caribbean, Brazil, India, and the United States,” wrote chef Marcus Samuelsson in his 2007 cookbook Discovery of a Continent: Foods, Flavors, and Inspirations from Africa. “I happen to love it and think it adds great texture and color to meals, but I do remember being a little put off by its slimy texture the first time I had it. Once you get over that, it’s easy to like.”

With that, he offers a simple and delicious recipe for a quick Spicy Okra sauté, with tomatoes, red onions, chiles, garlic and peanuts.

Marcus Samuelsson’s Spicy Okra, from his 2007 cookbook ‘Discovery of a Continent: Foods, Flavors, and Inspirations from Africa’

As its peak season is late summer and early fall, it’s a great time of year to celebrate okra — which continues growing until the first frost. (In case you’re wondering, Texas is the top okra-producing state in the U.S., followed by Georgia, California and Florida.)

This time of year I love to char it on the stovetop grill, toss it in something spicy and serve it as a nibble with cocktails. You don’t really need a recipe for that — just cut each okra in half lengthways, toss them in a little olive oil and salt, and grill them, cut-side down first, till they’re a little charred. Add something spicy — maybe sambal oelek, the Indonesian chile paste, or lightly spicy Aleppo pepper — toss, and serve. Sumac would be great, too.

Okra dishes, of course, are found throughout Africa. “The mucilaginous pod is the continent’s culinary totem,” wrote Jessica B. Harris in her seminal 1998 book, The Africa Cookbook:Tastes of a Continent. “From the bamia of Egypt to the soupikandia of Senegal, passing by the various sauces gombos and more, this pod is used in virtual continent-wide totality. It is native to Africa, and its origins are trumpeted by its names in a number of languages throughout the world. The American okra comes from the twi of Ghana, while the French opt for gombo, which harks back to the Bantu languages of the southern segment of the continent.”

Shrimp gumbo with smoked andouille sausage and okra, served with rice

So yes — it also gives gumbo, Louisiana’s iconic dish — its name.

In Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, Toni Tipton-Martin points out that “Ochra” Gumbo was Recipe Number 44 in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, published in 1881 by Abby Fisher. “Her formula,” writes Tipton-Martin, “which involved boiling a beef shank to create a savory and alluring broth, survived through the ages, the recipe variously being called okra stew, okra soup and okra gumbo.” She reproduces Mrs. Fisher’s recipe, which is short and sweet:

“Get a beef shank, have it cracked and put to boil in one gallon of water. Boil to half a gallon, then strain and put back on fire. Cut ochra in small pieces and put in soup; don’t put in any ends of ochra. Season with salt and pepper while cooking. Stir it occasionally to keep it from burning. To be sent to the table with dry boiled rice.”

During the first part of okra’s long season, in early pandemic, I found okra, shrimp and andouille sausage at the supermarket all at the same time, and happened to have a package of dried shrimp in my larder, so I improvised a gumbo. It was deliciously soothing — both to make and to eat. I made it again, and again, tweaking until it was just where I wanted it.

Try our recipe as is, or tweak away: Gumbo is ideally suited to improvisation.

Many gumbos get their body from okra; others from roux or filé powder (Native American sassafras powder). This one gets its body from a roux cooked long and slow to a beautiful coffee-with-a-touch-of-milk color, and the okra — which I roast first, to pull out the stickiness — gets added at the end. I serve filé, along with Louisiana hot sauce, at the table.

And finally, one of our favorite ways to celebrate okra is pickling it. We usually find okra pickles a bit sweet for our taste, but a recipe in Sweet Home Cafe Cookbook, the 2018 volume featuring recipes from the restaurant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. is perfectly marvelous.

The okra pods stay crunchy and snappy, and the pickles — brined with turmeric, garlic, coriander and Thai chiles — are delightfully spicy and bright.

RECIPE: Marcus Samuelsson’s Spicy Okra

RECIPE: Charred Okra with a Little Spice

RECIPE: Shrimp, Andouille Sausage and Okra Gumbo

RECIPE: Sweet Home Café’s Spicy Pickled Okra