Recettes Sudan

Kawari (Sheep's Hooves Stew)

Kawari is Sudanese hooves soup, and it belongs to the family of dishes built on the parts of an animal that carry no muscle at all. Sheep or cattle hooves are cleaned and cooked for hours until the collagen breaks down and the broth turns thick and gelatinous, which is the whole reason the dish exists. It is spiced in a way that places it squarely in the northeast of the continent. Cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, coriander, black pepper, ginger and garlic together are a Red Sea and Nile valley combination, and vinegar goes in to cut the richness. That combination reaches across the region: Egyptian kawaree uses calf feet with turmeric, Moroccan hergma uses ginger and paprika, and Turkish paça uses beans. All are the same idea handled by different kitchens. It is regarded in Sudan as a dish worth taking seriously, and the source that carries this recipe calls it the country's most popular soup. Like most long cooked offal dishes it splits opinion, and like most of them it is cheap, which is not incidental. A cut that takes six hours and yields a thick broth from almost nothing is a dish built by households that could not waste an animal.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

EasySudan

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Moukhbaza (Mashed Banana Paste)

Moukhbaza is mashed ripe banana with dried hot chilli, and the combination is the entire point. Sweet and hot together is a pairing Sudanese cooking returns to repeatedly, and moukhbaza is its most concentrated expression: nothing but banana, lemon juice and toasted chilli, with no attempt to soften the contrast between them. The source places it in eastern Sudan. It is worth being straightforward that closely related dishes under the same name are documented in Yemen, on the other side of the Red Sea, where mukhbaza is a well established banana and chilli preparation. Eastern Sudan faces Yemen directly across that water, and the Red Sea has carried food, people and language in both directions for a very long time. Which side of it the dish began on is not something the available record settles. Dried chilli is used across Sudanese cooking for range rather than simply for heat, and here it is toasted first, which deepens it and takes the raw edge off. Moukhbaza is served as a side or a relish rather than as a course, spread and eaten with bread, and a presentation version stuffs the mashed banana back into a halved and baked banana pepper.

EasySudan

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Baseema

Baseema is a Sudanese semolina-style coconut cake soaked in sugar syrup, and the name means scrumptious in Sudanese Arabic. It is one of the country's best regarded sweets, made for guests and for occasions, and it belongs to the wider family of syrup-soaked cakes found across North Africa and the Middle East. Desiccated coconut is what distinguishes it. Egyptian basbousa and Levantine namoura are close relatives built on the same principle of a dense cake flooded with syrup while hot, but baseema leans on coconut and yoghurt for its flavour and its texture, giving something moister and less grainy than a straight semolina cake. Vanilla and cinnamon carry it, alongside rose water in some households. The syrup is the whole technique and the timing is unforgiving. It is prepared first and left to cool while the cake bakes, then poured over the moment the cake leaves the oven, so that hot cake meets cool syrup and drinks it in rather than sitting in a pool. Getting that the wrong way round, or letting the cake cool first, is how baseema fails. Everything else about it is straightforward, which is much of why Sudanese cooks make it often.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hrEasySudan

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Kisra

Kisra, also spelled kissra, is the fermented flatbread of Sudan, South Sudan and Chad, made from sorghum flour left to ferment overnight and spread paper thin on a hot griddle. It is a staple rather than an accompaniment, and in Sudan its production has become a home based industry supplying households that no longer make it themselves. It comes in two forms. Kisra rhaheefa is the thin baked sheet, closely comparable to Ethiopian injera in appearance and in the lactic fermentation that produces it, though made from sorghum rather than teff. Kisra aseeda, also called aceda, is the same base cooked into a thick porridge instead. The two are eaten in different contexts and both are called kisra. The fermentation is what determines quality, and Sudanese cooks judge it by several variables at once: the sorghum genotype, the age and strength of the starter, the temperature and the time. Lactic acid bacteria and yeast do the work, producing the acids and alcohols that give kisra its sour flavour and its aroma. A weak or young starter gives a bland bread, which is why starters are kept going and shared between households.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

45 minMediumSudan

Recette de Nympha · Africook