Recettes Kenya

Pea and Mint Soup

Peas cooked briefly in a potato and stock base, blended with mint and lemon and finished with buttermilk. It is a British spring soup, and no country is claimed. The short cooking is the entire technique. Peas lose their colour and their fresh sweetness rapidly once they are cooked, chlorophyll degrades with heat and acid, and the sugars that make young peas taste of anything begin converting to starch. Five minutes is what the recipe allows, and the instruction is explicit that longer will cost you the flavour. Everything else in the pot, the potato, the onions, the garlic, is cooked through first, and the peas go in at the very end. The potato is doing structural work. It breaks down under the blender and thickens the soup, which is why no flour or cream is needed for body. Buttermilk rather than cream is the other choice worth noting. It brings richness with acidity behind it, which lifts the whole thing where cream would flatten it. The trade-off is that it curdles at a rolling heat, so the soup must be warmed through gently. It works hot or cold. Served cold it will thicken as it chills and needs loosening with more stock.

40 minEasyKenya

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Kuku Paka

Kuku paka is a coconut chicken curry from the Swahili coast, chicken grilled or seared first, then finished in a thick, spiced coconut sauce. It is one of the clearest demonstrations of how coastal East African food came together. The Swahili coast of Kenya and Tanzania sat on Indian Ocean trade routes for centuries, and African, Arab and Indian cooking met and merged there. Kuku paka carries all three: the coconut and the technique are coastal African, the spice set is recognisably Indian, and the whole is something that exists nowhere else. The name is Swahili, kuku is chicken. It is also known simply as Kenyan chicken curry, though that undersells how specific it is. The two-stage cooking is the part that matters. Grilling or searing the chicken before it goes into the sauce gives a charred edge that a straight simmer cannot produce, and that smokiness against the sweetness of the coconut is the whole character of the dish. It is served with rice, chapati or naan, all three of which are standard on that coast for the same historical reasons.

MediumKenya

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Dawa

Dawa means medicine in Swahili, and the name is a joke that stuck. The drink is lime muddled with sugar, poured over ice with vodka and finished with honey on a stirring stick, and Kenyans order it as their dawa in the way people elsewhere claim a drink is medicinal. Its origin is unusually well documented for a cocktail. It was created at the Carnivore restaurant in the Langata suburb of Nairobi, adapted from the Brazilian caipirinha after bartenders found the cane spirit cachaça gave them headaches and switched to vodka. One regular, who happened to be the restaurant's landlord, began asking for another dose of his dawa, and the name spread with the drink. It is now found across Kenya. The honey stick is the detail that makes it. A wooden stirrer is dipped in honey and left in the glass, so the drinker sweetens the drink themselves, controlling it rather than receiving it pre sweetened. There is also a non alcoholic version made as a hot tea with ginger, lemon, honey, cloves and cinnamon, drunk for sore throats and colds, which is dawa in the more literal sense and is what many Kenyan households mean by the word.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

5 minEasyKenya

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Kenyan Beef Biryani

Kenyan biryani is a Swahili coast dish, and the coast is where the Indian Ocean has been depositing influences on East Africa for more than a thousand years. Arab, Persian and Indian traders working the monsoon routes brought rice, spices and techniques to Mombasa, Lamu and Zanzibar, and what developed there is neither Indian nor Arab but Swahili. The biryani method itself is unmistakably South Asian: meat cooked in a spiced yoghurt gravy, rice parboiled separately with whole spices, the two layered and steamed together so the rice finishes in the gravy's steam. The Kenyan version keeps that structure. What it does differently is in the details, with fried onions used in quantity, tomato leaning heavier than in most Indian versions, and fried potatoes worked through the meat rather than served alongside. It is occasion food. Biryani appears at Kenyan weddings, at Eid, and at the large family meals where the effort is justified by the number of people eating. The orange food colouring streaked through part of the rice, which purists elsewhere would query, is standard in Kenya and is part of what a Kenyan expects a biryani to look like. Served with kachumbari, the raw tomato and onion salad, it is one of the clearest expressions of what the coast is.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 30 minHardKenya · African

Recette de Abigael Alfredah · Africook