Recettes Côte d'Ivoire

Fufu

Fufu is starch pounded to a smooth elastic mass, and it is among the most widely eaten things in West and Central Africa. The word comes from Twi, spoken in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, where it means to mash or to combine, and the sound of a mortar and pestle working in rhythm is the sound of fufu being made. What goes into it depends entirely on where you are. West Africa favours white yam, sometimes with plantain. Central Africa favours cassava. Plantain, cocoyam, semolina, rice and combinations of flours all appear, and each gives a different texture and a slightly different name. That variability is why fufu is better understood as a category than a recipe. It crossed the Atlantic with enslaved West Africans and survived. Foo foo and fou fou in the Caribbean are made with plantain or cornmeal, coocoo in Barbados is the same idea, and Cuban, Jamaican and Puerto Rican versions carry sweet plantain and pork fat. Whatever the base, it is eaten the same way: a piece is pulled off with the fingers, an indentation is pressed in with the thumb, and it is used to scoop soup or stew. It is never eaten alone, and its slightly tangy, near neutral flavour is what lets a heavily seasoned soup do the talking.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

50 minMediumCôte d'Ivoire · Nigerian

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

King Crab Legs with Melted Butter

Alaskan king crab legs, steamed briefly and served with melted butter and lemon. There is no African connection here and none is claimed: king crab is a cold-water North Pacific species fished off Alaska and the Russian Far East, and this is the standard American way of serving it. The single most useful thing to know is that king crab legs are sold already cooked. They are steamed aboard the boat or on the pier immediately after they are caught, then frozen, because crab meat spoils very quickly once the animal dies. What you are doing at home is reheating, not cooking, and that is why every instruction here is measured in a few minutes rather than tens of them. Treat them like a raw ingredient and you will get rubbery, stringy meat. The source is right to steer away from submerging them in water, which waterlogs the meat and washes out the flavour that the initial cooking sealed in. Steaming and a foil-wrapped spell in the oven both work because they warm the meat through without soaking it. Africa has a long coastline and a serious crab tradition of its own, Ghanaian akotonshi, stuffed crab served in the shell, is on this site, but it is built around warm-water species, and king crab is not one of them.

20 minEasyCôte d'Ivoire

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Kedjenou (Ivorian Sealed-Pot Chicken)

Kedjenou is chicken and vegetables sealed in a pot and cooked slowly with almost no added liquid, so the bird cooks in its own juices. It is Ivorian, and the source associates it particularly with the Baoulé. The method is the entire dish and it is genuinely unusual. Traditionally it is cooked in a canari, an earthenware jar with a narrow opening, which is sealed and set over a wood fire or coals. Because so little liquid goes in and almost none escapes, everything the chicken releases stays in the pot and concentrates. The result is intensely flavoured rather than diluted, the opposite of a stew, where liquid goes in and draws flavour outward. The name reflects the technique too. Kedjenou is generally understood to refer to shaking, the pot is shaken periodically rather than opened and stirred, because lifting the lid would let the steam out. This recipe reproduces that with foil under a tight lid in a low oven, and it works. Eggplant, tomato, onion, chilli, ginger and thyme are the standard vegetables. Guinea fowl is as traditional as chicken and arguably more so. The source's ingredient list gives almost no quantities and splits garlic across two lines. Working amounts are given below.

2 hr 50 minEasyIvory Coast · African

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Rice and Offal Balls

Cooked rice bound with minced liver, onion and egg, rolled into balls, crumbed and deep-fried. The contributor learned it from their grandmother in Ivory Coast. The dish belongs to a very widely distributed family, the fried rice croquette. Italian arancini, Middle Eastern kibbeh, Nigerian rice balls and this all work on the same principle: a starch cooked, cooled, bound with something rich and shaped, then fried so the outside crisps around a soft interior. The cooling is not optional in any of them. Warm rice does not hold its shape and the balls collapse in the oil. Offal is the other thing worth taking seriously. Liver and other variety meats are used across West African cooking as good ingredients rather than as economies, kilishi, dambu, gizdodo and asun all belong to the same attitude. Liver in particular is soft enough to bind rice without any additional fat, which is exactly why it works here. Two practical notes. The double coating, breadcrumbs then egg wash, is the reverse of the usual order, and the source may have it backwards; the conventional sequence is flour, egg, then crumbs. The source's nutritional inventory has not been carried across.

1 hr 15 minMediumIvory Coast

Recette de FoodChef · Africook