Palm nut cream (banga sauce base) substitutes

The same product under a different label. Canned palm nut cream, palm fruit concentrate, palm nut soup base and abenkwan base are all the same pressed palm fruit pulp.

Best for

banga soup, Ghanaian palm nut soup (abenkwan), palm nut stew with fish or goat

Worth saying plainly: this is the substitute, and the search for anything else usually ends in disappointment. Cans vary in how concentrated they are, from a thin puree to a stiff paste, so judge by consistency rather than by weight and dilute to the thickness of single cream before simmering. Cans labelled palm soup base are sometimes pre-diluted and lightly seasoned, so taste before you add salt.

Whole palm fruit, boiled until soft then pounded and pressed to separate the pulp from the fibrous nuts, which is how the canned product is made.

Best for

banga soup, palm nut soup, any dish where you want the fullest flavour

The best possible version and the most work. Boil the fruit for twenty-five to thirty minutes, pound it in a mortar to loosen the pulp from the nuts, then add hot water and press and strain to get an orange liquid, discarding the nuts and fibres. The flavour is brighter and fruitier than canned, which tastes slightly cooked-down by comparison. Frozen palm fruit sold in African grocers works the same way.

The base of West African groundnut soup, used to rebuild the dish around a different rich thickening ingredient.

Best for

a rich substitute soup with the same body, groundnut soup with goat, chicken or fish, cooking outside Africa

The best-tasting non-palm route, and the fair thing to say is that it makes a different soup rather than a copy: Ghanaian and Nigerian groundnut soup, which is a beloved dish in its own right. You get the same thick orange-brown body and the same richness, but nutty-sweet and heavier on the palate instead of tangy and earthy. Whisk the peanut butter with hot stock before adding it, buy the kind with no added sugar, and simmer at least twenty minutes so the raw peanut taste cooks out.

Ground white melon seed, which thickens and enriches soups through its own fat and protein.

Best for

a rich soup with meat and fish, egusi soup, cooking with West African pantry staples only

Gives you body and richness in a way no starch can, so the soup has the right weight in the mouth. What it cannot give you is colour or fruit: the result is pale cream rather than orange, slightly grainy, and completely without palm fruit's characteristic sour-earthy tang. Fry the ground seed in a tablespoon of palm oil for two or three minutes first, both for colour and to cook out the raw taste. Again, this is a good soup that is not banga.

An improvised combination that covers palm cream's separate jobs with three separate ingredients: fat and body, colour, and sourness.

Best for

improvising a palm-nut-style soup from supermarket ingredients, cooking for people who have never had banga

The most thoughtful hack on this list and still clearly not the real thing. The coconut milk gives creamy body, the palm oil gives the orange colour and a whisper of palm aroma, and the tamarind supplies the sour edge that palm fruit has naturally. The result reads faintly Southeast Asian, because coconut has a sweetness and a perfume that palm fruit does not, and the deep earthy character of palm pulp is simply absent. Simmer for twenty minutes and skim.

Red palm oil, listed here because it is the most common wrong answer and it is worth understanding why.

Best for

adding palm colour and aroma to a soup thickened by something else

Palm oil is the fat pressed out of palm fruit, and palm cream is the whole pulp: fat, fibre, colour and flavour together. Using the oil alone gives you an orange, greasy, thin liquid with a faint palm aroma and no body whatsoever, and no amount of it will thicken the pot. If palm oil is genuinely all you have, use two tablespoons for colour and aroma and thicken separately with ground egusi or a spoonful of ogbono, and accept that this is a palm-flavoured soup rather than banga.