ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
One of the most famous dishes across West Africa is jollof, fragrant rice cooked with spices, tomatoes and meat. The dish is a source of pride across the region, but every country prepares it a little differently. Some are smoky. Some are bright. All of them are delicious. But of course, every country swears theirs is the best. Here in the United States, traveling festival is putting the best to the test. NPR's Durrie Bouscaren reports from the Washington, D.C., Jollof Festival.
DURRIE BOUSCAREN, BYLINE: For many, the best jollof is the one you grew up with.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing, inaudible).
BOUSCAREN: But if you really want to get scientific about it, you might bring thousands of people to an outside market in Washington, D.C., and make them do a blind taste test. That's what the organizers of the Jollof Festival did here this weekend.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: But it bites you at the end.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yep. Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It's very slow. It builds up, and then at the end you're like, whoo.
BOUSCAREN: Two friends, Shakisha Coleman (ph) and Julia Agbasi (ph), pick up a box of six color-coded taster cups and compare notes.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: My heritage is Nigerian, so we used to eat jollof rice almost all the time. And it's delicious, but there are other regions that I'm really looking forward to eating.
BOUSCAREN: The cups themselves range from bright red rice to an earthy one with herbs.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I think the green cup has curry in it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Between pink and red, I'm going to go with red.
BOUSCAREN: Red was made by a local chef from Sierra Leone. Maggie Duncan August (ph) says she prefers Ghana's jollof. It's spicier, smokier.
MAGGIE DUNCAN AUGUST: You know when you have good jollof, and you know when you don't have good jollof (laughter).
BOUSCAREN: And there's Liberian jollof, which is a favorite of Virginia Richards (ph).
VIRGINIA RICHARDS: There's meat. There's veggies. There's flavor. There's a little bit of spice. Like, we're not afraid to make it more than just, like, rice or tomato sauce.
BOUSCAREN: Watching it all from his perch on a food truck is 27-year-old chef Mamadou Coite (ph). He and his mother are the chefs behind Senegal's submission to the Jollof Festival. They started cooking at 5 a.m., grilling the lamb and the chicken, preparing the tomatoes and peppers.
MAMADOU COITE: The secret is love, honestly. That's honestly the best thing I can tell you. The secret is just love and just cleanliness and just happiness. When you make it, you want to be happy. You want to be joyful. So people going to taste that when they eat it.
BOUSCAREN: Modern-day Senegal is likely where jollof originated in the 14th century. But Coite says the festival is not about winning or losing. It's more about bringing people together to appreciate West African food.
COITE: It feels like we're really putting ourselves out there as an African culture, as a African. I feel like people are really getting in tune and in touch with our culture, what it is to be African.
BOUSCAREN: At the end of the night, D.C. voters chose Ghana's spicy entry as the winner for the third year in a row. The festival now heads to Atlanta, South Carolina and Texas. So the jollof rivalry lives on.
Durrie Bouscaren, NPR News, Washington.
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