Recettes

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Okpa

Okpa is a steamed pudding of Bambara nut flour and palm oil, wrapped and cooked in boiling water until it sets solid. It is the street food of Enugu, and anyone travelling into the city from Onitsha or Lagos will hear the sellers calling okpa di oku, meaning okpa is hot. Bambara groundnut is an indigenous African legume, grown long before peanuts arrived from South America, and it is the same nut behind several dishes across the continent. It is known as jugo beans in southern Africa, and okpa itself is also called igba and ntucha. The seeds come in small pods and are extremely hard, so hard that domestic grinders cannot handle them and only industrial mills will do the job. That is why okpa flour is bought rather than made. Restraint is the principle. Bambara nuts have a good flavour of their own, and the source is emphatic that adding onions and crayfish ruins it, which is unusual advice in Nigerian cooking where those two go into almost everything. Palm oil, salt, stock cubes and pepper are the whole seasoning. The mixture looks alarmingly watery when mixed, and that is correct. The ratio in the recipe gives the right texture, and using less water produces something rock hard.

Les mieux notées

1 hr 25 minMediumNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

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Tuwo Shinkafa (Hausa Rice Swallow)

Tuwo shinkafa is the rice swallow of northern Nigeria and Niger, made by cooking soft short grain rice past the point most cooks would stop, then mashing it against the side of the pot until the grains give up their structure and come together as a smooth dough. Tuwo is a Hausa word meaning stiff porridge, and it names a whole family rather than one dish. Tuwo masara is made from maize, tuwo dawa from guinea corn or sorghum, and tuwo alkama from wheat. Shinkafa is rice, and it is the version most associated with Hausa cooking and the one most often served to guests. What it is eaten with matters as much as what it is. Northern Nigerian soups are its natural partners: miyan taushe made with pumpkin, miyan kuka from powdered baobab leaf, miyan wake from beans, and okra and egusi alongside them. In Ghana the same preparation is called omo tuo and goes with groundnut soup or palm nut soup, which is a different set of flavours around an identical technique. The rice variety is the one thing that cannot be compromised: it has to be soft and sticky, and long grain will not do it.

Les mieux notées

40 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Debby · Africook

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Yamarita

Yamarita is yam in an egg and flour coating, fried until the crust is crisp and the inside stays soft. It is a Nigerian treatment of the country's most important tuber, and it is straightforwardly a modern dish rather than an inherited one. The name gives away its logic. Yamarita is yam plus the ending of dundun ata or, by the more commonly repeated account, a play on the Yoruba way of naming a fried thing. Whatever the derivation, it belongs to the same family of inventions as yam chips and yam balls: ways of turning a starch that is usually eaten soft into something you can pick up with your fingers at a party. It sits alongside the older Nigerian yam preparations rather than replacing them. Pounded yam is ceremonial, yam porridge is domestic, yam with egg sauce is breakfast, and yamarita is what appears on a small chops platter next to puff puff and spring rolls. That is a real position in Nigerian eating even if it is a recent one, and the dish has spread well beyond the households that first made it.

Les mieux notées

1 hr 5 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Laila · Africook

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Hausa Masa

Masa, also called waina, is a fermented rice cake from the Hausa of Northern Nigeria: small, round, spongy underneath and browned on the surface, cooked in a dedicated pan with shallow round wells. It belongs to the Hausa, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, and it is among the dishes most closely identified with them. The fermentation is what makes it. Rice is soaked, ground with cooked rice, and left to rise overnight, and the mild sourness that develops is what separates masa from any other rice pancake. The holes that open across the surface as it cooks are the visible evidence of that ferment, and a masa without them has not been left long enough. It is breakfast food and snack food, sold from street stands and in markets across the north, and it appears at celebrations and family gatherings. What goes with it varies by household and by time of day: honey, groundnut oil, a peppery stew, or yaji, the same spice blend used on suya. Masa is a dish that has held its association with one people while spreading well beyond them, which is a fair description of how Hausa food generally has travelled through Nigeria.

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1 hrMediumNigeria

Recette de Laila · Africook

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Recettes