Recettes Nigeria

Kuli Kuli

Kuli kuli is a peanut snack eaten across Nigeria, Benin, northern Cameroon and Ghana, and it is one of the most widely recognised street foods in West Africa. It is made from peanuts alone, and the technique is what makes it: the oil is deliberately pressed out of the ground paste before the remaining solids are shaped and fried. That extraction is the point. Removing the oil leaves a dense, dry paste that fries into something genuinely crunchy rather than soft, and it also produces the frying oil as a by-product, so nothing is wasted. It is a piece of processing knowledge that predates industrial oil pressing and is still done by hand in Hausa communities in northern Nigeria, where the snack has its strongest association. It takes different shapes in different places: small sticks, rings, flat discs and irregular pieces are all standard, and the form varies by region and by seller. English names for it, groundnut cake and peanut snack among them, are approximations rather than translations. Kuli kuli is eaten on its own, mixed into garri with sugar and water, crumbled over salad, or served alongside fura and koko. Crushed to a powder it becomes the peanut component of suya spice, which is where most people outside the region encounter it without knowing.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

35 minMediumNigeria · West African

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Fried Plantain

Fried plantain is thick slices of ripe plantain, lightly salted and fried until the edges caramelise, and it is eaten wherever plantain grows. Across West Africa, East Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America and Southeast Asia, the same three ingredients produce essentially the same thing. Its names change with the border. In Nigeria it is dodo. In Côte d'Ivoire it is alloco. In Ghana the spiced version is kelewele, marinated in ginger and chilli before frying, which makes it a different dish rather than a different name. Those distinctions matter and are often blurred. Plantains are not bananas, though they look alike. They are starchier, they are cooked rather than eaten raw, and they can be used at any stage of ripeness for completely different results: green for chips and savoury dishes, ripe for this. What ripe plantain gives is the caramel-brown crust and the soft, sweet interior that the source describes as savoury-sweet, and it comes from the sugars that develop as the fruit blackens. No country is claimed here because the dish belongs to all of them.

20 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Beatrice · Africook