Cooking up a flavorful storm with Ruvimbo Mudzingwa
If you ever share a meal with Ruvimbo you can expect this – a minimum of five minutes of her decoding flavors, pointing out what she loves and what she’d like to experiment with in her own kitchen. Recently, upon her return from a trip to Seychelles, I watched her ask for a breakdown of the flavor profiles of honey she brought back which she unfortunately could not taste herself due to allergies. With this meticulous attention to detail and investment into what goes into a truly delicious and memorable meal, it is not shocking that she has poured this passion into ‘Homemade by Ruvi’ – a spice-blend business that aims to bring memorable culinary experiences to everyone’s kitchens.
Ruvimbo describes herself as a culinary enthusiast whose love for food was cultivated by her family of cooks and food lovers. As a young girl in Harare, Zimbabwe, Sundays were easily her favourite day of the week, as her family would get busy in the kitchen putting the after-church meal together. This shared love for food eventually grew on her and pushed her to experiment in the kitchen. While her passion for experimenting with food was something she could always carry with her, a career move to Kigali revealed an entirely different reality.
Moving from Southern Africa where spice blends were common, she found herself in a city where they were scarce, “When I moved to Rwanda, I noticed they had many individual spices but not many blends and for me that meant I had to take longer amounts of time in the kitchen mixing and trying out different spices. I eventually started playing around with what was available to me to create blends of flavors that reminded me of home.”
Eventually, she shifted from trying to recreate flavors and started creating her own, inspired by new experiences. In addition to this, she realized that many blends had wheat and high sodium levels and saw an opportunity to create wheat free and low-sodium spice blends.
When she moved back home to Zimbabwe, she decided it was finally time to share the four blends she had created with the world. Named in Shona, they include, ‘Hadyana’ – for beef, ‘Hangasa’ – for chicken, ‘Chomudziva’ – for seafood and ‘Machikichori’ – for pork. All the blends can be used in stews, curries or even braais and have distinct flavor profiles that are unmissable. “The names are based on what I grew up seeing or hearing in Zimbabwe, it’s my connection back to my country where the dream started. Machikichori for instance is something that was always said when we were eating something super delicious, so I always equate it to a pork chop on a braai stand.”
“I started these spice blends as a way to introduce Rwanda to the flavors I grew up with in Zimbabwe,” says Ruvimbo. Even though she did not eventually get to do this while she was in Kigali, she still made her dream a reality right in the place it was born. When thinking about the future of her business, Ruvimbo says, “Homemade by Ruvi is trying to make low-effort but amazing food accessible to everyone, really encouraging all people to participate in the joy that cooking brings…letting people know that they don’t have to eat bland and boring food just because they are not chefs.”