Recettes Kenya

Mandazi

Mandazi is the fried bread of the Swahili coast, the strip of East African coastline running through Kenya, Tanzania and the offshore islands, where Bantu, Arab, Persian and Indian influences have been folding into one another for a thousand years. It is usually cut into triangles, though rounds and squares are common too, and it is fried until it puffs and turns gold. The dough is enriched with coconut milk and scented with cardamom, and those two ingredients place it geographically as precisely as a map would: coconut from the coast, cardamom from the Indian Ocean spice trade that made these ports what they were. It is often described as a Swahili doughnut, which is fair as a shorthand and misleading in one respect. Mandazi is considerably less sweet than an American doughnut, and it is not glazed or filled. That restraint is what makes it useful, it goes with tea in the morning, with a bean stew at lunch, or on its own from a street stall, and none of those would work with something sugary. It was once more of an occasion food, made at Christmas and for celebrations. It is now everyday, which the source attributes plainly to changing lifestyles and to more people knowing how to make it. It reheats well, which is part of why it is made in quantity.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

EasyKenya

Recette de Beatrice · Africook

Poulet Fafa

Poulet fafa is Tahitian, chicken braised with taro leaves and coconut milk, and one of the defining dishes of French Polynesia. It takes its name from fafa, the Tahitian word for the taro leaf that goes into it. That leaf is the whole dish. Cooked long enough it collapses into something dark, soft and faintly earthy, closer in character to spinach or callaloo than to anything else, and it is what the coconut milk is there to carry. It is normally served alongside ahima'a, the Polynesian pit oven, the same underground cooking method found across the Pacific under different names, where food is buried over hot stones and left for hours. Poulet fafa is the pot dish that accompanies that, and it can be made entirely on a stovetop. Its close relative is chicken luau in Hawai'i, which is the same idea, chicken, taro leaf, coconut milk, under a different name, reflecting the shared Polynesian food culture across a very large stretch of ocean. **This is not an African dish.** It sits in the Worldwide collection because it is genuinely from Tahiti in French Polynesia, and it is kept on the platform rather than removed because people already visit the page. One thing matters for safety: taro leaves must be cooked thoroughly.

EasyKenya

Recette de FoodChef · Africook