Going cashew nuts

Our next activity in Cassamance, was exploring a bit of the Ousouye region during a bike ride, by VTT Casamance.

Accompanied by local guide Bonfils, our first stop was Joseph, a guy who, now that he's retired, started up a small, traditional cashew processing plant. So get ready to learn some new things about cashew nuts!

It's quite labor intensive, involving different steps, done by around 15 employees. A nice touch, in accordance to their social policy, one third of these employees have disabilities, one third are single (young) mothers and other staff:

The steps explained:
1. Steaming: 60 kg is put above water heated by a fire, using the shells of previous nuts.

The cooking arrangement, 60 minutes for 60kg

2. Breaking the nut away from its shell, which is still coated with a (toxic) oil. After the drying in the sun, this is done by an Indian mechanical machine.
3. Roasting, which removes the toxic and renders the cashew edible

Local oven, which heats at 70° during 6h for 40kg  cashew nuts

4. Cleaning and peeling the cashew nuts
5. Frying: in sunflower oil, since the local peanut oil isn't deemed appropriate.
6. Adding a flavor: spicy, salty, banana, honey or other

Locally harvested honey

7. Packaging: done in plastic bags, initially with an industrial sealer downtown, but since they had so many difficulties with power outages, now done with the help a simple candle and lots of practice.

Packages, in 7 flavors, almost exclusively sold to tourists at 1000CFA (1,55€)

 And then our bike ride continued through the fields, to more fetish aspects of the local animist culture (seen another blog post).