Recettes

Vegan Suya (Spiced Grilled Mushrooms)

Oyster mushrooms grilled and tossed in suya spice. It is a plant-based version of the Nigerian street food, and it works better than most meat substitutions do. **The traditional suya spice contains ground peanuts, and this recipe includes them.** The source flags it and offers to leave them out, which is honest, but it is worth stating clearly, because a peanut allergy and a suya spice blend are a genuinely dangerous combination and the name gives no warning. Suya proper is skewered beef, ram or chicken rubbed in yaji, the spice blend of ground roasted peanuts, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion powder and paprika, and grilled over open coals. It is Hausa in origin, from northern Nigeria, and it is sold across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Ghana and parts of Sudan. Kyinkyinga is the Ghanaian name, agashe the Sudanese. Oyster mushrooms are the right substitution and not an arbitrary one. Shredded, they have a fibrous, layered structure that genuinely resembles pulled meat, they take on the dry rub readily, and they char well. Most vegetables do neither. The source's method is very compressed, one step reads "put in a preheated medium", with the word oven missing, and has been filled out below.

30 minEasyNigeria

Recette de duchessnena · Africook

Sweet Stuffed Moroccan Chicken

Sweet stuffed Moroccan chicken is a whole bird filled with couscous, almonds and raisins, spiced with ginger and saffron, and roasted. The sweet-and-savoury combination is characteristic of Moroccan cooking rather than a novelty. Dried fruit and nuts with meat runs right through the cuisine, in tagines with prunes, in mrouzia with honey and almonds, in pastilla where sugar is dusted over a pigeon pie. The instinct is old and probably Andalusian and Persian in origin, and Morocco has kept it more completely than most. Saffron is what lifts it and is worth using properly. It is the most expensive spice in the world by weight, but very little is needed, and it should be bloomed in a little warm water or stock before it goes in rather than added dry, which wastes most of it. The couscous stuffing does two things: it carries the fruit and nuts, and it absorbs juices from the bird as it roasts. Ginger runs through the spicing alongside the saffron, and the combination is what makes it read as Moroccan rather than generally festive. Serves three to six depending on the bird.

MediumMorocco

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Mechoui

Mechoui is whole lamb or sheep, roasted slowly until the meat pulls away from the bone with no effort at all. The word comes from the Arabic for grilling or roasting, and the dish is found across the Maghreb, with the details shifting between countries. In Morocco it usually means a whole animal cooked in a clay oven over wood, a pit or domed oven that surrounds the lamb with even, indirect heat over several hours. In Algeria and more broadly in Maghrebi cooking it more often means spit-roasting over a fire. Both produce the same result by different routes: skin that crisps, and meat underneath that collapses. How it is served is inseparable from what it is. Mechoui appears at a diffa, a feast, and often at the beginning of the meal rather than the end. The host takes pieces with the right hand and offers them to guests. No cutlery is used, and none is needed, the meat comes apart between the fingers, which is both the test of whether it is properly cooked and the reason it is eaten this way. In Marrakech it is closely associated with the pit ovens of the medina, where it has been cooked commercially for generations. It is celebration food by construction: nobody roasts a whole lamb for four people on a Tuesday.

HardMorocco

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Kati Kati

Kati kati is grilled chicken finished in palm oil, and it belongs to the Nkom people of the Northwest region of Cameroon. It is one of the older and more distinctive dishes of that area, and the method is unusual: the chicken is charred over an open flame first, then simmered in palm oil with seasoning. Made traditionally it is stark. Freshly butchered chicken, salt and freshly ground pepper only, roasted over open fire until well coloured, then lightly simmered in palm oil with a stock cube. Everything else is a later addition. This version uses granulated garlic, onion powder and cayenne before grilling, which the contributor is clear is their own adjustment rather than the traditional preparation. The contributor also makes a point worth passing on: do not throw any part of the chicken away. Neck, gizzard, feet and back are, in their view, the best parts, and breast and thigh the least interesting. That is a common position across West and Central African cooking and it runs directly counter to how chicken is usually sold and eaten elsewhere. Rooster is recommended over hen for being lean and the most flavourful while still cooking through on the grill. It is served with corn fufu and njama njama, the huckleberry greens of the region.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hrEasyCameroon

Recette de Blessing · Africook