It's a Tea...It's a Juice...It's Foléré!

I've been amazed by the host of new foods we've tasted, heard about and even started learning how to make since arriving in Cameroon. They have quite tasty fare here, much of it starring ingredients I have never seen or used before.

Last week a Cameroonian lady who is an excellent cook gave us a session on different ingredients that are key to cooking here. She also served us a delicious drink called foléré, and told us how to make it.

Foléré is made like a tea, hot, and is then cooled. Officially, I guess it is a hibiscus flower tea with some added flavor. But it tastes more like a delicious fruit juice than it does tea. Some may even go so far as to say it tastes like Kool-aid. Some, meaning people like Adam, who like Kool-aid. But people like me, who do not really like Kool-aid, may not make that comparison, feeling that it cheapens foléré's reputation as a worthy and truly marvelous drink!

Anyways, I liked it a lot and decided I had to make some. So, here's how I made the foléré. First, I went to the market with my friend Christy, and bought a few pineapples and a couple bags of dried hibiscus flowers:



I chopped up a pineapple for supper (our family has been eating approximately one pineapple a day, no joke) and saved the rinds and extra cuttings for making the foléré:

I boiled the hibiscus flowers in about two liters of boiling water. After that mixture had boiled/simmered for about a half hour, I added the pineapple rinds for about twenty minutes more of boiling:

I poured the whole pot through a strainer so that only the liquid remained and the flowers and pineapple parts were taken out (Christy mentioned today that one could reuse the flowers and pineapple pieces to make another batch of foléré, just using less water). I sweetened the mixture with sugar. Then I cooled the tea in the fridge overnight. Here is what a glass of the delicious, refreshing final result looks like!

Would you like to try some of this stuff? It's so good. I don't know if you can find dried hibiscus flowers around the U.S. in stores, but I wouldn't be surprised. If you know where to find them, leave a comment! I noticed that you can buy them online at http://www.earthy.com/; however, $12 a pound seems a little expensive.

Meanwhile, I think I will keep on making foléré here, since I have the opportunity to go to the market where heaps of the dried flowers and stacks of luscious, fresh pineapples are readily available...and where they probably cost about the same as a few packets of Kool-aid mix would cost back in the U.S.A. :)