Recettes

Edo Black Soup

Edo black soup takes its name from its colour, and the colour comes entirely from its leaves. Bitter leaf, scent leaf and uziza are ground together until they release a dark green so deep it reads as black in the bowl, and that grinding is the whole architecture of the dish: the leaves are the thickener, the flavour and the appearance at once. It belongs to Edo State in southern Nigeria and is particularly associated with the Esan people. Within Nigeria's enormous catalogue of soups, black soup is distinguished by how little palm oil it uses. Most southern Nigerian soups are built on a generous quantity of it; this one uses enough to round the leaves and no more, which leaves the bitterness and the aromatic sharpness of the greens in the foreground rather than behind a screen of oil. The three leaves are argued about. Some Edo cooks hold that two are sufficient, others that all three are necessary for balance, and the ratio between them is a matter of household preference. Black soup is eaten with fufu or pounded yam, and the pairing of a dense swallow against a soup this concentrated is the point of both.

Nigeria40 minTaiwo Oladapo

Igbo Yam Porridge

Yam is not simply a staple crop among the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria. It is the crop, tied to land, status and the agricultural calendar in a way no other food is, and the yam that goes into this porridge carries that weight into an ordinary weekday meal. Yam porridge is the most direct way to eat it. Slices are cooked until they begin to break down and thicken their own liquid, so the dish is both the yam and the sauce it makes. What marks the version out as Igbo rather than as one of the several other Nigerian yam pottages is the seasoning: ogiri, the fermented seasoning made from oil bean or melon seed, and uziza leaves, whose peppery aroma goes in at the very end. Palm oil supplies the colour and the richness, crayfish the savoury base. Ogiri is the ingredient that decides the dish. Its fermented depth is what separates an Igbo yam porridge from a Yoruba or Hausa preparation of the same root, and households that leave it out are making something else. The porridge is eaten at breakfast and as a light lunch, and it belongs to ordinary domestic cooking rather than to any occasion.

Nigeria30 minDebby

Semovita

Semovita is one of Nigeria's swallows: the family of smooth, firm starch preparations that are pinched off by hand, rolled between the fingers and used to lift soup from a bowl. The swallow is not a side dish. In Nigerian eating it is the vehicle and the soup is the flavour, and a meal is understood as the pairing of the two. It is made from semolina, the coarse milling of durum wheat, and it belongs to the wheat based end of the swallow spectrum rather than the cassava, yam or maize end. That places it alongside amala, eba, fufu, pounded yam and starch as one option among several, chosen by household preference and by what the soup is. Semovita is smoother and milder than most of the alternatives, which is a large part of its appeal. Its status is worth stating plainly: Semovita is a brand name that has become the general term for the product, in the way a number of household names have. The dish is Nigerian, industrially produced and comparatively recent, and it earned its place at the table on texture rather than on history. It is eaten with ogbono, okra, efo riro, egusi and every other Nigerian soup.

Nigeria17 minBlessing

Hausa Masa

Masa, also called waina, is a fermented rice cake from the Hausa of Northern Nigeria: small, round, spongy underneath and browned on the surface, cooked in a dedicated pan with shallow round wells. It belongs to the Hausa, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, and it is among the dishes most closely identified with them. The fermentation is what makes it. Rice is soaked, ground with cooked rice, and left to rise overnight, and the mild sourness that develops is what separates masa from any other rice pancake. The holes that open across the surface as it cooks are the visible evidence of that ferment, and a masa without them has not been left long enough. It is breakfast food and snack food, sold from street stands and in markets across the north, and it appears at celebrations and family gatherings. What goes with it varies by household and by time of day: honey, groundnut oil, a peppery stew, or yaji, the same spice blend used on suya. Masa is a dish that has held its association with one people while spreading well beyond them, which is a fair description of how Hausa food generally has travelled through Nigeria.

Nigeria1 hrLaila

Peppered snail, a spicy Nigerian finger food of African giant snails in a scotch bonnet pepper sauce

Peppered Snail: Spicy Nigerian Finger Food

Peppered snail is party food in Nigeria. It arrives on a plate with cocktail sticks, it is eaten standing up with a drink in the other hand, and it belongs to celebrations, family gatherings, weekend events and the kind of occasion where people are moving between conversations rather than sitting down to a meal. The snails are African giant land snails, considerably larger than the garden snails eaten in Europe, and their texture is the whole point: firm, dense and chewy, closer to a scallop or a squid than to anything on a butcher's counter. They carry almost no flavour of their own, which is why they can take the heat they are given. The pepper sauce, built on scotch bonnet, onion, garlic and bell pepper, is what you actually taste, and the snail is what carries it. Snail is expensive in Nigeria relative to most proteins, which contributes to its place at events rather than at weekday meals. It is a dish that signals the occasion is worth something, and that association is as much a part of why it is served as the taste is.

Nigeria55 minDebby

Egusi Soup

Egusi soup is eaten across every region of Nigeria, every ethnic group and every economic class, which is a claim very few dishes anywhere can support. Its name changes with the language and the dish does not: miyan gushi in Hausa, ofe egusi in Igbo, efo elegusi in Yoruba. Its defining ingredient is ground egusi, the dried seed of a gourd related to the watermelon, milled to a meal that thickens and enriches the soup around it. The seeds are ground dry, without water, until the powder turns to a paste under the blade. Nothing else produces the particular nutty, faintly bitter depth that egusi gives, which is why the soup is named for the seed rather than for the meat or the greens that also go into it. There is no single method. The caking approach lets the ground seed set into soft curds in the stock; the frying approach starts the egusi in palm oil; the moulding approach forms it into balls that are eaten like meat. Ijebu cooks in Ogun State make it with no vegetables at all. Every one of these is egusi soup, and Nigerians will argue for their own without seriously disputing anyone else's. It is eaten with pounded yam, fufu, eba, amala or any swallow at hand.

Nigeria50 minFoodChef

Buka stew, a Nigerian pepper stew with assorted meats cooked in bleached palm oil

Buka Stew With Assorted Meats (Obe Ata)

Buka stew is the pepper stew of western Nigeria, named for the places that made it famous. A buka is a small, cheap local eating house, and the buka is where working Lagos eats: fresh food, several dishes, no cooking at home, and no pretensions about any of it. The stew belongs to those kitchens and carries their signature. It is a pepper stew rather than a tomato stew, and the distinction is the whole recipe: tatashe and rodo dominate and tomato is kept back, which is the reverse of the everyday Nigerian stew ratio. The palm oil is bleached first, heated until it changes character, and that step produces the specific aroma that makes a buka identifiable from the street. Seasoning is kept minimal on purpose, because the peppers and the oil are doing the work. It is made with assorted meats, the cow parts that a household kitchen might skip and a buka never does, deep fried before they go into the pot. The women who run these kitchens are known collectively in Nigerian speech as Iya Basira, a name that stands in for all of them, and mama put is what the roadside version is called. Buka stew is eaten with white rice, beans, yam, fried plantain or agege bread.

Nigeria50 minJennifer

Danwake, Northern Nigerian bean and baobab leaf dumplings tossed with oil, pepper and fresh vegetables

Danwake Assorted

Danwake is a Northern Nigerian dish of small dumplings made from bean flour and ground baobab leaf, then cooled and dressed with oil and pepper. The dumplings are pale green from the kuka, soft and slightly springy, and they are eaten in quantity rather than as a delicate portion. Its origin is given as Niger, and it has been adopted so completely across Northern Nigeria that it now reads as a staple of the region rather than an import from it. The flour blend varies from one part of the north to another, which means there is no single correct danwake and households treat the mix as something to have an opinion about. Traditionally it is eaten as danwake da mai da yaji, which is Hausa for danwake with oil and pepper, and that is the whole dish in its plain form. The eating method is part of the memory people carry of it: children pick up a single ball with a broomstick, swirl it in the oil and pepper, and eat it that way, one at a time. A fork is the modern substitute and is more hygienic, which is not the same as saying it is better. The assorted version here carries egg, tomato, onion and bell pepper alongside the base.

Nigeria45 minMaryam

Miyan kuka, a Northern Nigerian baobab leaf soup, dark green and thick, served with tuwon shinkafa

Miyan Kuka (Baobab Leaves Soup)

Miyan kuka is Hausa soup made from powdered baobab leaves, and it is the one Northern Nigerian dish that people warn you about before they serve it. It is dark green, mucilaginous and thick, and it does not look like anything anyone finds appetising on first sight. Northerners are entirely aware of this and serve it anyway, because the taste is not in dispute even where the appearance is. Kuka is the dried and ground leaf of the baobab, sold as a dark green powder in markets across the north and instantly recognisable to anyone who has shopped there. The powder is whisked into a seasoned stock at the very end of cooking, which is where the soup gets both its body and its drawing texture. It is also called luru. Nigeria's soups map closely onto its peoples, and miyan kuka is the north's entry in that map: Yoruba households have ewedu, Igbo have ofe ugba, Edo have bitter leaf soup, the riverine south has fisherman soup. Miyan kuka is eaten with tuwon shinkafa, tuwon dawa or any swallow, and it is one of the dishes that is genuinely better on the second day, which is a claim its cooks make readily and which holds up.

Nigeria30 minBeatrice

Nigerian pancakes, thin savoury sweet pancakes made with onion and pepper in the batter

Nigerian Pancake (Diet)

The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and slightly crisp at the edges, and it is savoury as often as it is sweet. Onion and ground pepper go into the batter alongside the sugar, which produces something no other pancake tradition attempts: sweet, savoury and faintly hot in the same mouthful. It sits a long way from the thick fluffy pancake of the American breakfast table. There is no raising agent and no attempt at height. The batter is loose, the pan is tilted to spread it thin, and the result has a dense bite and a lacy edge. Nigerians eat it at breakfast with tea, and just as readily as an afternoon snack with a cold drink. What it is served with follows the same double logic as the batter. Honey, sugar, condensed milk, peanut butter and fresh fruit on the sweet side; pap, custard, oats and yogurt drinks such as kunu aya or zobo alongside. It is home food and street food at once, cheap to make from things most Nigerian kitchens already hold, and it belongs to no particular region of the country, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

Amala

Amala is the swallow of the Yoruba southwest, and it is the darkest thing on a Nigerian table. Yam is peeled, cut, dried and milled into a flour called elubo, and the drying turns the white tuber brown. In boiling water that brown becomes near black, which is the colour amala is known by and which surprises people who expect a starch to be pale. Its home is Oyo State, and Ibadan in particular. The pairing of amala with ewedu, the jute leaf soup, is treated in Ibadan as something close to a civic institution, and the same seriousness attaches to it in Lagos, where you will not find a buka without it on the menu. Yoruba speakers make the comparison directly: amala and ewedu stand to an Ibadan person as akpu and ofe onugbu stand to an Igbo one. Three flours make three amala. Elubo isu, from yam, is the standard and gives the dark version. Lafun, from cassava, gives a white amala and is a different dish in practice. Elubo ogede, from unripe plantain, is lighter in colour and lower in starch. The technique is unforgiving in one specific way: the flour must go into water that has been taken off the heat, or it lumps, and lumps in amala are the fastest way to ruin it.

Nigeria20 minBeatrice

White amala with ilasa soup, a Yoruba pairing of cassava flour swallow and okra leaf soup

Preparation of White Amala and Ilasa Soup

White amala and ilasa soup is a Yoruba pairing from southwestern Nigeria, and both halves of it are local specialities rather than national staples. The amala is white because it is made from cassava flour, known as lafun, rather than the dried yam flour that gives the more familiar dark amala its colour. Ilasa is okra leaf soup, and it is the more particular of the two. It is made from the leaves of the okra plant rather than the pods, whisked with a cooking broom until the soup draws into a light green mass with a texture close to ewedu. Ground melon seed goes in first to give it body. Ilasa is closely associated with Igbo-Ora in Oyo State, where it is a town speciality, and it is far less widely eaten than ewedu or okra pod soup even within Yorubaland. That local specificity is the point of the dish. Nigeria's food is often described nationally, and the reality underneath it is that towns and even quarters hold their own preparations. A visitor to Igbo-Ora would be served ilasa; a visitor to Ibadan would be served ewedu. Both are Yoruba, both are eaten with amala, and neither substitutes for the other.

Nigeria1 hrTaiwo Oladapo

Gullisuwa

Gullisuwa is a Hausa fried pastry from Northern Nigeria, made from wheat flour worked with ground roasted peanuts and fried until crisp. The groundnuts are what distinguish it. They give the pastry a toasted, faintly sweet base that a plain flour dough does not have, and groundnuts are one of the defining crops of the northern Nigerian savannah. It belongs to celebration rather than to the everyday. Gullisuwa appears at weddings, at festive occasions and as street food, made in quantity because it keeps well and travels well, and it is offered to guests as part of the spread rather than served as a course. That is the usual position of a fried snack in Hausa hospitality: present, plentiful and not the point of the meal. Its exact origin is not documented. What can be said is that it belongs to the Hausa, that it has been made for generations, and that Northern Nigeria's long trade and cultural connection with the Sahara and the Arab world is visible in a good deal of its sweet and fried food. Beyond that, the specific lineage of gullisuwa is not recorded, and the honest position is to say so rather than to construct one.

Nigeria50 minLaila

Nigerian pounded yam, a smooth elastic white yam swallow served with soup

Easy Ways To Make Nigerian Pounded Yam

Pounded yam is white yam softened and then beaten until it becomes smooth, sticky and elastic, and it sits at the top of the Nigerian swallow hierarchy. Nigerians will argue about most things in their food and generally will not argue about this: iyan is what you serve when the occasion matters. The pounding is the dish. The yam is softened, transferred hot to a mortar and worked with a pestle until the structure breaks down completely and the mass turns stretchy, and there is a technique to it that varies between ethnic groups and is learned rather than described. It is hard physical work, traditionally done by women though not exclusively, and the sound of it carries. It is called iyan by the Yoruba, and the same or a closely related preparation is foutou in Côte d'Ivoire, fufu in Togo and Benin, and yam fufu in Ghana, which makes it one of the most widely made yam products in West Africa. Its texture is what distinguishes it from the rest of the swallow family: smoother than eba, more elastic than amala, and considerably more work than either. Food processors, blenders and hand mixers have made it accessible on a weeknight, and pounded yam flour has made it possible with no yam at all, which purists note without much affecting what happens in most kitchens.

Nigeria30 minBeatrice

A Nigerian style pasta salad with macaroni, carrots, sweetcorn, peas and boiled egg in a mayonnaise dressing

Simple Pasta Salad Recipe (With Video)

The mayonnaise dressed vegetable salad is a fixture of the Nigerian party table, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is not a salad in the European sense at all. There are no leaves at the centre of it. It is built on cooked vegetables, sweetcorn, egg and sometimes macaroni or baked beans, bound in mayonnaise and evaporated milk, and it is served cold in a large bowl alongside jollof rice and fried plantain. It arrived through colonial and post independence British influence on Nigerian catering, and it has been thoroughly domesticated since. The evaporated milk in the dressing is the clearest marker of that: it is not a British addition, and it gives the dressing a sweetness and a thinner consistency than mayonnaise alone. Nigerians of a certain age associate it directly with owambe, the large celebration parties where the food is served in quantity. This particular recipe is a contemporary quick version rather than a documented traditional dish. It uses macaroni, carrot, peas, sweetcorn, lettuce and egg with a mayonnaise and milk dressing, and it is presented by its author as an everyday meal rather than as party food. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to that broader Nigerian salad practice; what cannot be established from the source is any particular lineage for the recipe itself.

Nigeria35 minAmako Blessing

Nigerian Buns

Nigerian buns are fried dough balls with a crunchy outer crust and a soft, cake like interior. They sit alongside puff puff and chin chin in the small group of fried snacks that account for most of what Nigerians eat between meals, and the differences between the three are understood precisely by anyone who grew up with them. Buns are the rich one. Where puff puff is yeast raised and made from almost nothing, buns use baking powder for lift and include egg, butter and milk, which produces a denser, sweeter, more substantial thing with a genuinely crunchy shell. They also absorb less oil in the frying, which is a real practical advantage and a point people make in their favour. They are everywhere: sold from roadside trays and by hawkers, made at home for children after school, brought to parties and picnics, and eaten with tea at breakfast. The flavouring is open, with nutmeg the most common and cinnamon and vanilla both standard, and every household has a version that is slightly sweeter or slightly denser than the next. They are best hot and are still good at room temperature, which is most of what a snack needs to be.

Nigeria35 minBeatrice

Dambu nama, Northern Nigerian dried and shredded spiced beef served as a snack

Dambu Nama (Shredded Meat)

Dambu nama is dried, shredded and fried beef from Northern Nigeria, fine and fibrous, closer to floss than to jerky. It is popular among the Hausa and Fulani, and its name is straightforward Hausa: dambu for the shredded form, nama for meat. It began as preservation. Fresh meat was scarce in the dry season, and drying beef in the sun and then pounding or shredding it into fine strands made it keep, made it light to carry, and concentrated it. Spices were added over time, which improved the flavour and did further preservative work. That the result is now eaten as a snack rather than as a store against a hard season is the usual arc for a preserved food that turned out to be good. Its texture is what makes it distinctive. Where kilishi, its northern neighbour in the dried meat category, stays as thin sheets, dambu nama is broken down into fine fibres, which changes entirely how it is eaten. It is taken by the pinch or the spoonful, scattered over rice or eaten straight, and it holds for a long time in a sealed container. It is also frequently sold ready made, since the drying and shredding are the slow parts.

Nigeria50 minLaila

Fluffy Pancakes

The thick, risen pancake is a North American and British form rather than an African one, and the source for this recipe says so directly: it describes itself as a basic UK recipe. It is included here as a plain reference version, not as a dish with a claim on the continent. That distinction matters because Africa has its own pancakes and they are not this. The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and deliberately savoury, carrying onion and ground pepper in the batter alongside the sugar. Hausa masa is a fermented rice cake, spongy and slightly sour, cooked in a pan of round wells. Ethiopian injera is a fermented teff flatbread that functions as a plate. Each of those is a distinct thing with its own technique and its own place at a table. What this recipe offers is the baking powder raised, egg and milk enriched, butter cooked pancake that most of the world now recognises from breakfast menus. It is genuinely good and genuinely simple, and there is no reason not to make it. There is also no reason to describe it as African cooking, and the honest position is to present it as what it is.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

Dambu, a Hausa steamed maize grits dish with shredded meat, groundnuts and spring onions

Dambu With Veggies

Dambu is a Hausa steamed grain dish made from grits rather than flour, and the distinction is what gives it its texture. Whole maize, wheat, sorghum or millet is cracked into coarse pieces called tsaki, moistened, and steamed until the grains separate into something that looks and eats a great deal like couscous. Which grain goes in decides which dambu you are making. Tsakin masara is maize grits and tsakin alkama is wheat, and Hausa households treat the versions as distinct in the same way they distinguish between the tuwo made from each grain. The steaming is done in two stages, with the additions going in halfway, which is what lets the groundnuts and vegetables perfume the grain rather than sit on top of it. In its plain form dambu is eaten with oil and chilli flakes and served alongside a soup such as miyan taushe, miyan kuka or a tomato stew. It can also be built out into a complete dish with meat, vegetables, oil and seasoning worked through it, which is what this version does and which Hausa cooks describe as making it jollof. The word dambu also names a shredded dried meat, dambu nama, which is a different preparation entirely despite the shared name.

Nigeria40 minMaryam

Gbegiri, a smooth Yoruba bean soup, served alongside ewedu and amala as abula

Gbegiri Soup (Beans Soup)

Gbegiri is Yoruba bean soup, smooth to the point of being velvety, pale orange from a small quantity of palm oil, and mild in a food culture that generally is not. It comes from southwestern Nigeria and it is rarely eaten alone. Its natural home is abula, the combination that puts gbegiri and ewedu together on a plate with amala and a pepper stew. The three components do different things: gbegiri brings body and mildness, ewedu brings the drawing green texture, and the stew brings heat. Ordering abula in an Ibadan or Lagos buka gets you all of it, and many people go to a buka specifically for the gbegiri. Making it well is a matter of texture rather than seasoning. Brown beans or black eyed beans are soaked so the skins can be slipped off, cooked until they collapse, and then either blended or worked through a sieve with an ijabe, the small cooking broom. Oyo State cooks will tell you the sieve is the authentic method and the blender is the concession, and both routes are used. The palm oil goes in for colour rather than flavour, and the quantity is deliberately small.

Nigeria35 minBlessing

Pate, a Northern Nigerian one pot grain porridge with kenaf leaf, meat and groundnut

Pate Hausa Food

Pate is a Northern Nigerian grain porridge, built on cracked corn or rice and loaded with vegetables, meat and groundnut until it stops being a porridge and becomes a full meal in one pot. It is particularly associated with Nasarawa and Kaduna states in the middle belt and north. What separates it from the many other grain dishes of the north is the vegetables. Kenaf leaf, known as rama, and sorrel leaf, known as yakuwa, go in alongside tomato, pepper and locust bean, and the greens are added late so they keep their colour and structure. Groundnut, as powder or paste, gives it body and a nutty depth that ties the whole pot together. It is household food in the most direct sense: a single pot, cheap ingredients, and enough of it to feed a family without anything else on the table. Pate is passed down rather than taught formally, and the composition shifts with what a household has and what the market held. Brisket bones and assorted meat go in for the stock as much as for the meat itself, which is why the pot ends up with more depth than its ingredient list suggests.

Nigeria45 minDebby

Nigerian Egg Roll

The Nigerian egg roll is a whole hard cooked egg wrapped in a slightly sweet dough and deep fried, and it has nothing to do with the Chinese egg roll beyond the name. The closest comparison is a Scotch egg, with dough in place of sausage meat, and the resemblance ends at the structure. It is street food and travel food. Egg rolls are sold from glass cases at bus stops, from hawkers' trays in traffic, and from the small kiosks that cluster around Lagos offices, and they exist because they solve a specific problem: something substantial, cheap and self contained that can be eaten with one hand in a stationary car. Anyone who has spent time in Lagos traffic understands the appeal without further explanation. The dough is what makes it Nigerian rather than generic. Flour, baking powder, sugar, margarine and nutmeg produce something between a bread and a cake, faintly sweet against the plain salted egg inside, and that sweet and savoury combination is a Nigerian snack signature that also runs through buns, puff puff and chin chin. It is eaten with tea, fruit juice or chilled zobo, and it is substantial enough that people eat it as breakfast or lunch rather than as a snack.

Nigeria50 minDebby

Ogi, a Nigerian fermented corn porridge served with akara bean cakes

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Ogi is fermented cereal porridge, sour, smooth and pale, and it is among the first things most Nigerians ever eat. It is called akamu in Igbo and pap in English, and it is made from maize, sorghum or millet steeped in water for up to three days, wet milled, sieved to remove the husks, and then fermented for several more days until it turns distinctly sour. That sourness is the point and it is what separates ogi from any other cereal porridge. It also does real work: fermentation makes the grain more digestible and gives ogi a probiotic character, which is a large part of why it has been the standard weaning food for Nigerian infants for generations and why it is given to people who are unwell or recovering. The same base goes in two directions. Thinned and cooked, it is the porridge eaten at breakfast with akara, moin moin, fried plantain or bread. Cooked much thicker and left to set, it becomes agidi or eko, sliced and eaten with pepper soup or stew. Across the region the names change without the thing changing much: koko in Ghana, uji in Kenya, where it is more often made from millet and sorghum. Three grains are used in Nigeria, and white corn, yellow corn and guinea corn each give a slightly different result.

Nigeria10 minDebby

Fura Da Nono

Fura da nono is millet and milk, and the name says exactly that: fura is the millet ball, nono is the fermented milk. Spiced millet dough is rolled into balls, then mashed into soured milk and drunk from a bowl or a calabash. It is both a meal and a drink and Nigerians do not find that ambiguous. It belongs to the Sahel and to the peoples who move across it. The Fulani, the Hausa and the Zarma-Songhai all make it, and it is eaten across northern Nigeria, Niger and Ghana. Its logic is the logic of cattle keeping: milk that will not keep in the heat is soured deliberately, and millet that grows where little else does is what goes with it. The way it is sold explains its form. Vendors carry the fura balls and the nono separately and combine them to order, mashing the millet into the milk in front of the customer, which lets them sell two products from one stand and keeps the fura from going soggy before it is bought. In a hot climate, a cold, sour, filling drink that costs very little is a serious thing rather than a refreshment, and fura da nono has held its place in northern Nigerian life without needing to modernise.

Nigeria30 minDebby

Suya spice, the Nigerian yaji blend of ground roasted peanuts, cayenne, ginger and paprika

How to Make Suya Spice at Home (Nigerian Yaji)

Yaji is the spice blend that makes suya suya. Ground roasted groundnuts form its base, and that is what separates it from every other dry rub in the world: a spice mixture built on a nut rather than on seeds and chillies alone. Ginger, garlic, onion and paprika go in around it, with cayenne carrying the heat. It belongs to the Hausa of Northern Nigeria, and the recipes are held closely. Every suya vendor guards a proprietary arrangement of spices, and the specific balance is treated as commercial property rather than shared knowledge, which is why no two suya taste quite the same and why the exact composition is genuinely difficult to pin down. What is consistent is the groundnut, the aromatics and the heat. Its use extends well past the meat it is named for. Yaji is a marinade, a dry rub applied before grilling, and a finishing powder scattered over meat as it comes off the fire, and Nigerians use it on roasted vegetables, on fish, on chips, on plantain and on nuts. It is sold ready made at Nigerian grocers, and having a jar of it in the house is the single fastest route to making Nigerian food taste like itself.

Nigeria37 minDebby

Nigerian cheese shawarma, a flatbread wrap filled with fried protein, sausage, slaw and melted mozzarella

Quick and Easy Cheese Shawarma Recipe

Nigerian shawarma is its own thing. The name and the flatbread wrap come from the Levant, brought to Nigeria largely through Lebanese communities in Lagos and Kano, but what happens inside the wrap is Nigerian and would not be recognised in Beirut. The differences are consistent enough to constitute a style. Nigerian shawarma carries a cold, crunchy cabbage and carrot slaw dressed in mayonnaise, ketchup and chilli sauce rather than the tahini, pickles and garlic sauce of the original. It very often includes a sausage alongside the main protein, which is a purely Nigerian addition. And it is pressed on a hot griddle at the end so the wrap seals and crisps, which is closer to a toasted sandwich than to the Levantine service. This version includes mozzarella, which is a further step in the same direction. Shawarma stands are a fixture of Nigerian nightlife and are found outside bars, at filling stations and along busy roads in every large city, usually operating from a cart with a vertical rotisserie and a griddle. It is late night food above all, and the mayonnaise and ketchup dressing that a purist would object to is exactly what Nigerians mean when they order one.

Nigeria35 minAmako Blessing

Liver suya, Nigerian spiced liver kebabs coated in groundnut and pepper yaji and grilled on skewers

Liver Suya (Liver Kebab)

Suya is not restricted to any one cut, and liver is among the most common of the alternatives. Kidney and tripe appear too, and the offal versions are cheaper, cook faster and carry the yaji spice differently from beef, which is a large part of why they have their own following rather than being a fallback. Liver takes spice better than muscle meat does. It is soft, mineral and slightly sweet, and it absorbs the groundnut and pepper coating almost immediately rather than needing time to marinate. It also cooks in minutes, which suits the trade: a suya vendor working a roadside grill at night needs something that goes from raw to served while the customer waits. The name changes across West Africa without the thing changing much. Suya in Nigeria, soya in Cameroon, chinchinga or sitsinga in Ghana, and brochettes in the Francophone countries. The spice blend, yaji, is what holds it together, and it has no fixed recipe: the composition varies by vendor and by region, and each is guarded. What is consistent is ground groundnut, chilli, ginger and garlic, and a heat level that varies from cook to cook while the intensity of flavour does not.

Nigeria45 minCuisine228

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.

Nigeria25 minNympha

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.

Nigeria1 hrLaila

Amala lafun with ewedu soup, a Yoruba pairing of white cassava swallow and jute leaf soup

Amala Lafun and Ewedu Soup

Amala lafun is white amala, made from cassava flour rather than the dried yam flour that produces the dark version, and it is particularly associated with the Oyo people of southwestern Nigeria. Ewedu is jute leaf soup, whisked to a fine green draw. Together they are one of the most eaten combinations in Yorubaland. The buka is where most people first meet it. Nigerian bukas, the small cheap eating houses of the southwest, serve amala with ewedu and a pepper stew as a matter of course, and the three together are called abula. Ordering it is a single decision rather than three, and people have loyalties to particular bukas that last decades. Lafun behaves differently from black amala and needs handling to match. Where elubo from yam is added to water taken off the heat, lafun is thickened gradually with hot water and benefits from a brief steam on the stove afterwards, which is what gives it the smooth stretchy texture it should have. Ewedu is cooked with potash, which holds the green colour and helps the leaves break down, and is mashed with an ijabe, the cooking broom, into fine pieces rather than blended smooth. It is also eaten with okra soup and efo riro.

Nigeria50 minTaiwo Oladapo

Beetroot Rice

Beetroot rice is rice cooked with beetroot, which turns it a deep purple, and it is worth saying plainly that the source for this recipe is describing an Indian dish. Beetroot pulao is a well established South Indian preparation, and the source's own text discusses pulao, sona masuri rice and serving with raita, none of which are Nigerian references. That does not make the dish uninteresting, and there is a real Nigerian angle to it. Rice is the most eaten starch in urban Nigeria and cooked rice with stew is among the most common household meals in the country, so a coloured rice variation slots into an existing habit easily. Nigerian cooks have adopted vegetable rice dishes from a range of sources and made them ordinary, in the same way that spaghetti and coleslaw have become normal parts of the national table. What can be said with confidence is that this is a contemporary dish rather than an inherited one, and that its documented lineage runs to India rather than to Africa. The country field is left empty for that reason. Beetroot itself is not an African crop and is not part of any traditional African preparation on the continent. The recipe is included as what it is, with the attribution left open for a contributor to settle.

Nigeria40 minMaryam

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.

Nigeria35 minAnthonyJ

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