Recettes

Chicken Curry Sauce

This is a Nigerian take on a curry sauce: chicken breast marinated in ginger, garlic and all purpose seasoning, cooked with carrots and bell peppers, and thickened with a cornstarch slurry rather than reduced or enriched with cream. Two things mark it as Nigerian rather than South Asian. The first is yaji, the suya spice built on ground peanuts, paprika, cayenne, ginger and garlic, which goes in alongside the curry powder and gives an aromatic depth no Indian curry would have. The second is the cornstarch slurry, which is how a great many Nigerian sauces are thickened, giving a glossy sauce that clings rather than a reduced one. The vegetables are meant to keep their bite. Carrots and bell peppers go in after the onion and are cooked only until slightly tender, which is characteristic of Nigerian party cooking, where texture and colour matter as much as flavour. The heat is moderate and adjustable through the scotch bonnet. Because yaji contains ground peanuts, this dish carries a peanut allergen despite nothing in its name suggesting one.

50 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook

Moi Moi / Moin Moin

Moi moi is steamed bean pudding, and it is among the small group of Nigerian dishes that turn up everywhere: at breakfast, at parties, at weddings, in lunchboxes, beside jollof rice, and on its own. Black eyed peas or brown beans are soaked, peeled, blended with pepper and onion, seasoned, and steamed until they set. The peeling is what most people underestimate. The bean skins have to come off before blending, because they are what stands between a smooth moi moi and a gritty one, and the quality of the blend decides the texture of the finished dish more than any other single factor. Nigerian markets have heavy duty commercial mills for exactly this reason, and home blenders often cannot manage it. What it is steamed in changes the result and the name. Uma leaves, from Thaumatococcus daniellii, give the best flavour and cook fastest; banana leaves are the common alternative; aluminium foil and heatproof containers are the modern route. Nutmeg is the ingredient people leave out and then wonder why their moi moi does not taste like the one at the party. Egg, corned beef or bone marrow goes into the middle, and moi moi appears as a side to jollof and fried rice, as breakfast with pap or bread, and as a meal in itself.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 30 minMediumNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Baked Plantain Loaf

Ripe plantains mashed to a paste, combined with rice flour and turmeric-infused oil, then baked in a loaf tin and sliced. The source places it in Ivory Coast, where plantain in every form is close to universal. It is worth being clear about what this is, because the title is misleading in two directions. It is not sliced plantain roasted in an oven, which is what most people mean by baked plantain. And the recipe uses rice flour as a binder and turmeric for colour, which makes it a plantain loaf or cake, closer in construction to a steamed pudding than to a side dish. The slug says load rather than loaf, which appears to be a typo in the original; the URL has been kept exactly as it is. One ingredient does not fit the stated origin. Chilli sambal is Indonesian and Malay, and it is not part of Ivorian cooking. It may be a substitution the contributor made for a local pepper paste, but the source does not say so, and rather than invent an explanation it has been flagged. The source's nutritional comparisons with potato have not been carried across. What matters for cooking is that ripe plantain is sweet and starchy, and that is what makes the loaf hold together.

1 hr 30 minMediumIvory Coast

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Coconut Chicken Curry

Coconut chicken curry is a one-pan dish of chicken simmered in coconut milk with a curry spice blend and whatever vegetables are to hand, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, potato, carrot. The word curry is worth being precise about. It is not a single spice or a single dish. It comes from English usage during colonial rule in India, applied broadly to spiced saucy dishes, and it now covers an enormous range of unrelated cooking across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and East Africa. A curry powder sold in a jar is a blend, and the blends differ substantially between manufacturers and regions. Coconut milk versions belong mainly to the coastal and tropical end of that range, southern India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Caribbean, and the Swahili coast of East Africa, where coconut is grown and used heavily. This particular recipe is a general one rather than a regional tradition, which is its strength: it tolerates substitution well and is designed to be varied. **Filed as Worldwide**, the recipe as written makes no specific national claim, so attributing it to any one cuisine would be inventing detail.

40 minEasyNigeria · American

Recette de Jennifer · Africook