Dry fermented cassava granules (gari) soaked in cold water with sugar, groundnuts and sometimes milk or coconut. The fast, cheap snack a student or worker mixes in minutes.
Garri soakings is the broke-day staple — the snack a Nigerian student soaks when money is short, requiring no cooking and no stove. It is the West African parallel to the way Black Southern households stretched cornmeal and made something from very little.
Garri itself is fermented cassava — mostly starch, low in protein, but the fermentation gives it some resistant starch and gut-friendly qualities. As a snack it lives or dies by what goes in the bowl: soaked with sugar and milk it is a sugar bomb; soaked with roasted groundnuts and little or no sugar, the peanut's protein and magnesium turn it into a balanced bite. The honest move is to load the groundnuts and skip the sugar, which converts a cheap carb snack into something that holds you. Keep portions reasonable because the cassava starch is glycemically significant.
Put a few spoons of gari in a bowl, cover with cold water, and let it swell for a minute or two. Add roasted groundnuts; traditionally also sugar, milk or coconut. The better version: heavy on peanuts, no added sugar, maybe a little coconut.
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