Gari is a dry, granular flour made from fermented, toasted cassava — the starchy root of Manihot esculenta — and it is one of the great staples of West Africa, eaten across Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cameroon and beyond. The peeled roots are grated to a mash, pressed to squeeze out the juice, left to ferment for a few days, then sieved and roasted on a hot pan until they dry into crisp, sandy, cream-coloured grains. The result is a shelf-stable, faintly sour and toasty granule that can be turned into food in seconds: stirred into hot water it swells into the stiff dough called eba, and soaked in cold water with sugar, groundnuts and milk it becomes a cooling drink or snack known as garri soakings. It is distinct from plain cassava flour and from tapioca starch — gari is the whole grated root, fermented and toasted into grains, not the bland refined flour or the extracted starch.