Recettes Nigeria

Nigerian Amasi Spaghetti

This recipe puts amasi, the South African fermented milk, into a Nigerian style spaghetti sauce, and it is worth being clear that it is an invention rather than a dish with a history. Amasi belongs to the Nguni cattle keeping communities of southern Africa, where it is soured in a calabash and eaten over pap. Spaghetti belongs to urban Nigerian home cooking, where it has become one of the most eaten starches in the country. Putting them together is a pan African fusion of a kind that happens more and more as African food writing circulates across the continent, and there is nothing wrong with it. What there is not is any tradition behind it. No Nigerian household inherited this, and no South African one did either. What it does do is show what fermented milk brings to a tomato sauce, which is a real thing worth knowing. Amasi is thick, sharply sour and stable enough to go into a hot pan without curdling in the way fresh milk would, and it turns a tomato and mince sauce creamy and tangy at once. Buttermilk or plain yoghurt does the same job. The dish is presented here as what it is: a modern combination using an African ingredient in an unfamiliar way.

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1 hrEasyNigeria

Recette de Laila · Africook

Fried Yam

Fried yam is called dundun in Yoruba, and it is one of the most eaten street foods in Nigeria. Yam is peeled, cut into thick chips, salted and fried until the outside crisps and the inside stays soft and floury. It is sold from roadside stands with a pepper sauce, and it is eaten at breakfast, at lunch and late at night. Yam is the crop that Nigeria produces more of than anywhere else in the world, and dundun is the most direct thing to do with it. It costs almost nothing, needs three ingredients, and the frying takes minutes. That combination is what makes it street food: a vendor with a pot of oil and a sack of yam is in business. Its usual partner is akara, the fried bean cake, and the pairing of dundun and akara with a ground pepper sauce is a standard Nigerian breakfast. It is also eaten with egg sauce, with fried fish, with stew, or on its own. The word dundun covers the fried treatment specifically, as distinct from the plain, pounded and porridge treatments of the same tuber, each of which occupies its own place on the Nigerian table.

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35 minEasyNigeria

Recette de AnthonyJ · Africook

Pan-Toasted Jollof Rice

Parboiled rice toasted in butter and oil before it meets the stew, then finished under foil. It is a Nigerian method, and the point of it is that it does not burn. Conventional jollof demands attention. The rice sits on the base of the pot absorbing stew, and without stirring and checking it catches, which is why the bottom layer of a party jollof is either the best part or a disaster depending on the cook. Toasting the rice in fat first coats each grain, which both slows absorption and stops the grains sticking to the pot and to each other. The result is a jollof you can put down and walk away from. That trade-off is worth understanding. You lose the smoky bottom layer that party jollof is prized for, and you gain a dish that cooks unattended and comes out evenly. The other instruction that matters is the source's own: season and fry the stew thoroughly before the rice goes in. Because the rice is coated in fat, it absorbs more slowly and takes on less seasoning from the liquid, so the stew has to be right before they meet. Washing the rice and letting it dry properly beforehand matters for the same reason: wet rice will not toast. This competes with several jollof pages on this site, which is flagged.

1 hr 25 minEasyNigeria · West African

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Foufou Powder

Foufou powder is the dried flour used to make fufu without pounding, and it is a manufactured product rather than a dish. Traditional fufu is made by pounding cooked cassava, yam or plantain in a mortar, which is slow and produces a wet paste that spoils quickly. The powder is the industrial answer to both problems. It is made from fermented cassava paste, dried and milled, and it carries the nutty, faintly sour flavour that fermentation gives. Plantain, cocoyam and yam are processed the same way, so foufou powder is a category rather than a single product. Most Nigerians in the south rank fufu second only to garri among indigenous staples. Foufou, fufu and foutou are the same word in different spellings, and the dish is eaten across western and central Africa and in the Caribbean, where it travelled with African migration. Its origin is generally given as Ghana. The powder is used for more than fufu: it thickens gravies, soups and stews, and it can be used to coat meat and fish for frying. This entry covers the powder and how to make fufu from it, along with the sauce the source pairs it with.

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1 hr 5 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook