Our organic fonio: five minutes of cooking, and nothing else to do

Fonio is the fastest of grains. One volume of grain to two volumes of salted boiling water, cover, take off the heat, and five minutes later it is ready. The tiny grains never clump, and take on the flavour of whatever you give them — coconut milk, peanut sauce, hibiscus dressing.

What its composition allows us to say

Fonio is low in fat (3 g per 100 g) and low in saturates (0.47 g). Above all it is very low in salt: 0.02 g per 100 g, a trace. For anyone watching their salt, it is a far more interesting side than a prepared starch.

Naturally free from gluten

Digitaria exilis contains no gluten — that is not a process, it is the plant. It makes a direct alternative to semolina, bulgur and couscous in a gluten-free kitchen, without the rubbery texture of industrial substitutes.

A grain that comes from somewhere

Grown for more than five thousand years on the West African plateau, fonio thrives where little else does: poor soils, little water, a short cycle. It is a food-security crop as much as a festival grain, served on important occasions. Ours comes from Burkina Faso, grown without inputs and hulled locally.

In the kitchen

Allow 60 g per person as a side, 80 g as a main. It suits savoury and sweet alike, and the raw grain makes a remarkably crisp gluten-free coating — the use nobody thinks of.

Our recipes: five recipes for five uses, three easy recipes, and cashew chicken, which is served on top of it.

Where these figures come from

The values shown come from published reference data for raw fonio and give a reliable order of magnitude; a particular batch may vary slightly. The wordings in bold correspond to the thresholds of Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006.