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Soft drinks from Uganda

East and Southern African malt-assisted sour drinks (bushera, munkoyo, chibwantu, oshikundu)obushera

These are non-alcoholic sour drinks made by cooking a cereal porridge, thinning and sweetening it with an amylase source, and leaving it to ferment spontaneously for about a day. Ugandan bushera is made from sorghum or millet flour or maize, Zambian munkoyo uses beaten Rhynchosia roots on maize porridge, and Namibian oshikundu uses pearl millet with sorghum or pearl millet malt.

Fully documentedSoft drinks14 h – 2.1 days

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedHousehold practice from a survey of 172 munkoyo makers and consumers (Phiri et al. 2019); the sources read give times but no fixed amounts.
Maize meal (munkoyo) or sorghum or millet flour (bushera)Soaked in water and cooked into a porridge[phiri2019][muyanja2003]
Rhynchosia roots, beaten and stripped (munkoyo)The amylase source that thins and sweetens the munkoyo porridge; about 5 % of munkoyo makers used millet malt, cowpea roots or sweet potato peels instead[phiri2019]
Water
Starterspontaneous

Total time across the recorded steps: 14 h – 2.1 days

Start
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Close-up: water moving into a grain

What changes: Maize meal soaks in water before it is cooked

Step 1 of 5
Soak the maize meal in water
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Lactic acid bacteria
Yeasts
Lactobacillus plantarum
L. fermentum
L. brevis

Survey step for munkoyo; the soaked meal is then cooked. Output: wet meal.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

These are non-alcoholic sour drinks made by cooking a cereal porridge, thinning and sweetening it with an amylase source, and leaving it to ferment spontaneously for about a day. Ugandan bushera is made from sorghum or millet flour or maize, Zambian munkoyo uses beaten Rhynchosia roots on maize porridge, and Namibian oshikundu uses pearl millet with sorghum or pearl millet malt. Made in 5 steps over 14 h – 2.1 days. The longest step, ferment in buckets or calabashes, takes 12 h – 2 days (Phiri S 2019). Household bushera: Lactobacillus plantarum, L. paracasei subsp. paracasei, L. fermentum, L. brevis, L. delbrueckii subsp. delbrueckii and Streptococcus thermophilus and Munkoyo: Lactobacillus plantarum, Weissella confusa, Lactococcus lactis and Enterococcus italicus in the final product do most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step12 h – 2 daysMeasured[phiri2019]Ferment in buckets or calabashes
Temperature45 °CMeasured[zulu1997]Add the amylase source (beaten Rhynchosia roots or malt)
AciditypH 3–4.5Measured[muyanja2003][phiri2019]Ferment in buckets or calabashes

What makes this one different

Munkoyo uses an amylase source on cooked porridge, so it turns sweet before it sours. Munkoyo is unusual in using a root, Rhynchosia, instead of malt.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Obushera typesSplit into their own entries: obushera-obutoko, ekitiribita, obuteire.
  • Oshikundu (Namibia)Pearl millet meal with sorghum or pearl millet malt; white and milky, sweet, pH 3.3–3.7 (Ignat et al. 2020, a review).
  • Chibwantu (Zambia)Made in a similar way to munkoyo, in central and southern Zambia, with a slightly different taste (Schoustra et al. 2013).

Made the east and southern african malt-assisted sour drinks way

Safety

Munkoyo samples sat at pH 3–4 and household bushera at pH 3.7–4.5, but some household bushera still carried coliforms up to 5.2 log cfu/mL.

Hazards the sources name: Coliforms (below 1 to 5.2 log cfu/mL in household bushera).

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Phiri et al. (2019) report that calabashes were historically the usual fermenting vessel for munkoyo and that plastic buckets are now the commonest. Schoustra et al. (2013) note that in the few years before their study, munkoyo and chibwantu variants made with added enzymes and artificial flavourings, with no live-culture fermentation, had become commercially available.

  1. [muyanja2003] Muyanja C.M., Narvhus J.A., Treimo J., Langsrud T. 2003, Isolation, characterisation and identification of lactic acid bacteria from bushera, a Ugandan traditional fermented beverage, International Journal of Food Microbiology 80:201–210 (abstract)paper
  2. [phiri2019] Phiri S., Schoustra S.E., van den Heuvel J., Smid E.J., Shindano J., Linnemann A. 2019, Fermented cereal-based Munkoyo beverage, processing practices, microbial diversity and aroma compounds, PLoS One 14:e0223501paper
  3. [zulu1997] Zulu R.M., Dillon V.M., Owens J.D. 1997, Munkoyo beverage, a traditional Zambian fermented maize gruel using Rhynchosia root as amylase source, International Journal of Food Microbiology 34:249–258 (abstract)paper
  4. [ignat2020] Ignat M.V. et al. 2020, Current functionality and potential improvements of non-alcoholic fermented cereal beverages, Foods 9:1031 (review; oshikundu row)paper
  5. [schoustra2013] Schoustra S.E., Kasase C., Toarta C., Kassen R., Poulain A.J. 2013, Microbial community structure of three traditional Zambian fermented products, mabisi, chibwantu and munkoyo, PLoS One 8:e63948 (history note)paper