Recettes Nigeria

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

Boiled Beans

Black-eyed peas soaked, cooked until tender and seasoned with salt. That is the entire recipe, and it is deliberately so: this is the base that a great many Nigerian bean dishes are built from, and it is eaten plainly in its own right. In Nigerian usage, beans without further qualification usually means black-eyed peas, ewa in Yoruba, agwa in Igbo, wake in Hausa. They are indigenous to West Africa, domesticated there thousands of years ago and carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, which is why they are as central to Southern American cooking as to Nigerian. Eaten plainly, boiled beans go with a pepper sauce, fried plantain, fried yam or bread, and that combination, beans and bread, beans and dodo, is everyday food across the country. From this same pot come the more elaborate dishes: ewa agoyin with its dark fried pepper sauce, honey beans, beans porridge. Two things in the method deserve keeping. Picking through dried beans for stones is not fussiness, small stones do get through commercial sorting and they break teeth. And salting only at the end is correct, because salt added early toughens the skins and lengthens the cooking considerably. The source's extensive nutritional and weight-loss claims have not been carried across.

55 minEasyNigeria

Recette de duchessnena · Africook

Alkubus

Alkubus is a Hausa steamed wheat bread from Northern Nigeria, plain by design and made to be eaten with something else. It is soft, faintly sour from the yeast, and it holds its shape well enough to be cut into rounds or wedges. Its role on the plate is the role bread plays across the north: the thing that carries the soup. Alkubus is eaten most often with miyan taushe, the pumpkin and groundnut soup, and it also goes with agushi soup, vegetable soup, cabbage stew or a plain tomato sauce. That pairing with miyan taushe is the one Northern Nigerians name first. There are two ways to make it and they produce different things. Baked in a greased pan and topped with carrot and onion, it is a loaf to be cut and eaten in slices. Portioned into wrappers and steamed over boiling water, it comes out softer and denser, closer to a dumpling, and that is the method the recipe here follows. Steaming rather than baking runs through a great deal of Hausa cooking, from dambu to danwake to masa, and alkubus belongs to that family more than it does to any oven tradition.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

25 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Tuwon Masara (Corn Meal Swallow) Recipe

Tuwon masara is maize swallow, and the name is Hausa and literal: tuwo for the cooked mass, masara for maize. It is one of the everyday staples of Northern Nigeria and among the plainest things the region cooks, which is entirely by design. It is the same family as tuwon dawa, made from guinea corn, and tuwon shinkafa, made from rice, and Hausa households treat the three as distinct rather than interchangeable. Masara gives a paler, milder, slightly sweeter tuwo than dawa, and it is the version most commonly compared to polenta by people trying to explain it. The comparison is fair on ingredient and misleading on treatment: polenta is seasoned and enriched, while tuwon masara is cooked in plain water with nothing added, because its job is to carry the soup rather than to compete with it. That is what the northern soups are for. Miyan wake made from beans, miyan taushe with pumpkin and groundnut, miyan zogale from moringa, miyan kuka from baobab leaf, miyan ridi from sesame. Tuwon masara goes with any of them, and with any Nigerian soup from further south. The corn is dried, ground to a medium consistency and sieved fine, and the resulting flour is stirred into boiling water and worked smooth.

MediumNigeria

Recette de Amara · Africook