Recettes

Chicken Suya

Suya is skewered meat coated in yaji, a dry peanut based spice blend, and it is the best known street food in Nigeria. It comes from the Hausa people of the north, where it is also called tsire, and it spread from there across West Africa. Sudan has a close relative in agashe. Yaji is what makes it suya rather than grilled meat. The blend is built on ground peanut, usually in the form of kuli kuli crushed to a powder, with ginger, chilli, onion powder and other seasonings, and the peanut is what gives suya its particular nuttiness and the slightly gritty coating that clings to the meat. Meat without yaji is not suya, whatever else is done to it. Beef and ram are the traditional cuts, along with kidney, liver and tripe, and chicken is the newer arrival that has become common. It is sold at night from roadside grills, cut on a board and handed over in newspaper with sliced raw onion, tomato and cabbage, and the raw onion alongside the hot spice is not a garnish but part of how it is eaten. The one thing worth knowing before making it is that yaji contains peanut, which matters to anyone with an allergy.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 25 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Chicken Curry Sauce

This is a Nigerian take on a curry sauce: chicken breast marinated in ginger, garlic and all purpose seasoning, cooked with carrots and bell peppers, and thickened with a cornstarch slurry rather than reduced or enriched with cream. Two things mark it as Nigerian rather than South Asian. The first is yaji, the suya spice built on ground peanuts, paprika, cayenne, ginger and garlic, which goes in alongside the curry powder and gives an aromatic depth no Indian curry would have. The second is the cornstarch slurry, which is how a great many Nigerian sauces are thickened, giving a glossy sauce that clings rather than a reduced one. The vegetables are meant to keep their bite. Carrots and bell peppers go in after the onion and are cooked only until slightly tender, which is characteristic of Nigerian party cooking, where texture and colour matter as much as flavour. The heat is moderate and adjustable through the scotch bonnet. Because yaji contains ground peanuts, this dish carries a peanut allergen despite nothing in its name suggesting one.

50 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook

Gizdodo (Gizzard and Plantain)

Gizdodo is a portmanteau and a fair description: gizzard plus dodo, the Yoruba word for fried ripe plantain. Cooked gizzards and fried plantain cubes are combined in a spicy pepper sauce, and the two textures against each other are the whole point. It is party food and home food in equal measure across Nigeria. At an owambe it appears as a side alongside jollof rice, and it works as a starter or a substantial snack in its own right. The pairing with jollof is close to standard. Gizzards are the reason it works. They are muscular and dense, and they need proper cooking, about twenty-five minutes, before they are fried, at which point they become firm and chewy in a way that holds up against the soft sweetness of the plantain. Chicken gizzards are the usual choice and turkey or duck both substitute. The technique that matters is draining the blended pepper mix through a sieve before it goes in the pan, which removes excess water so the sauce clings rather than pooling. This recipe carries no quantities at all, which is common in Nigerian home recipes and is flagged here.

55 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Coconut Chicken Curry

Coconut chicken curry is a one-pan dish of chicken simmered in coconut milk with a curry spice blend and whatever vegetables are to hand, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, potato, carrot. The word curry is worth being precise about. It is not a single spice or a single dish. It comes from English usage during colonial rule in India, applied broadly to spiced saucy dishes, and it now covers an enormous range of unrelated cooking across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and East Africa. A curry powder sold in a jar is a blend, and the blends differ substantially between manufacturers and regions. Coconut milk versions belong mainly to the coastal and tropical end of that range, southern India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Caribbean, and the Swahili coast of East Africa, where coconut is grown and used heavily. This particular recipe is a general one rather than a regional tradition, which is its strength: it tolerates substitution well and is designed to be varied. **Filed as Worldwide**, the recipe as written makes no specific national claim, so attributing it to any one cuisine would be inventing detail.

40 minEasyNigeria · American

Recette de Jennifer · Africook