Serengeti Kitchen
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
My name is Chef Ammalu. I am the owner and the executive chef of Serengeti Kitchen. We are located inside the Market at 7th Street. We specialize in Tanzanian cuisine.
The food that brings me back immediately to my childhood memory is chapati. Growing up, we ate a lot of chapati. Chapati is a very popular food that we enjoy during breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Growing up, I remember dipping them in our coconut beans. That is my favorite way of enjoying chapati.
The family recipe that is written is from my mother. My mother used to be a caterer, so growing up, I used to help her. One of the things that was very popular in her business was fish cake. She would mix them with potatoes and tuna fish. Growing up, I was able to take that recipe from my mother and ended up changing it in my own way.
I developed a business here in America. I wanted to give something that would be more relatable to my community here in America. Since my Serengeti Kitchen is based in Uptown Charlotte, I took crab meat instead of tuna. Then I wanted to bring the Tanzanian influence into the crab cake. So I added plantain, but I dehydrated it and blended it into a powder. Imagine bread crumbs, but made out of plantains, to give me that base to hold the crab cake.
The kitchen was really small. It was a really narrow kitchen. We had an electric stove, but on top of that, we also had to use a charcoal stove. Imagine a barbecue charcoal grill, but in the form of a stove. It takes only one pot at a time. We had that in the house. We had a little patio—we used to call it a balcony—so we would open the door and this little stove would be right there. Then we would have the electric stove. I used to use the electric stove, but the kitchen was packed with so many dishes everywhere. We didn’t have enough cabinets to place our cooking pots and everything, but everything made sense at that time. It worked. We were very okay with it until I grew up and saw something bigger and imagined, “Oh, maybe I need a bigger space.” But at that time, everything was just perfect. It was interesting. It was our lifestyle. We loved every bit of it.
The reason we also had that charcoal stove is sometimes we would go without electricity for a few hours or even the whole day. So we always had a backup plan on how we could manage to go throughout our day to meet our needs.
The first time I recreated my mom’s recipe to how it is now was when I wanted to become a personal chef. I did a private coaching session with one of the chefs here. Her name is Chef Lisa. I really wanted to stick with my origin, Tanzania. I know Americans eat plantains and they eat potatoes, but potatoes are more popular than plantains. I wanted it to be really light at the bite. It took several attempts. Boiling them didn’t work. I tried roasting them. I was not happy with the outcome. That’s when I came up with the idea of dehydrating them, then putting them in a food processor and blending them. It became the right amount.
I also wanted to add some kind of sauce to go with it. There is this sauce in Tanzania called sambar, a mixture of mango and habanero peppers with other spices.
This particular recipe stays with me so close because these fish cakes are very popular in Tanzania. We enjoy them. If there is any function, they will always be on the menu.
When you go to street food, they’re always there, and they come in different versions. I remember growing up during Ramadan, the month we fast, when we break our fast, this would be on the table—the first bite you would take along with the samosas. It’s very dear to me. I enjoyed making it with my mom in the kitchen. They meant a lot to me.
This recipe has influenced me in the way I cook today by keeping it original as much as possible. I tend to overthink and worry—will this be okay for my customers? Will they like it? Because my menu is very different. You’re doing Tanzanian cuisine. You can change maybe a little bit, yes, but make sure you keep it as original as possible.
If somebody finds this recipe—maybe my grandchildren, hopefully even my son, because one of my sons has high interest in cooking—I always talk with him. I say, “Maybe you can take over Serengeti Kitchen one day.” So I would really hope that they will keep it and cherish it and use it to share with their family and share it with the community, because it’s something my mother taught me. It’s still meaningful to me, especially in my childhood memory. Hopefully they will see that, learn the story, and be able to keep that going.
My mother has tried my version of this new dish—the recipe that I’ve changed—and she thoroughly enjoyed it. She did advise me to add a few things here and there. In Tanzania, we really enjoy using lime juice, but I kept it minimal in this cake. She wanted me to add a little more. She said, “I feel like it will have a better taste if you add lime juice.” So that was her advice.
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