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Recettes
Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.
Gages is a Sierra Leonean aubergine and tomato salad, marinated in vinegar and oil and finished with flaked coconut and roasted peanuts just before serving. The aubergine is fried in butter first, which is what separates it from a raw salad.
The structure is a marinated salad rather than a cooked dish, and the long chill is where the work happens. Three hours minimum, and overnight is better, lets the vinegar and oil work into the fried aubergine and the raw tomato and onion soften slightly without losing their shape. It is one of very few African dishes served genuinely cold.
Coconut and peanuts go on at the last moment and are the point of the dish. Both go soft within minutes of meeting the dressing, so adding them early loses the crunch that the whole thing is built around. Both are staples of Sierra Leonean cooking, where groundnuts appear in everything from stews to snacks and coconut grows along the coast. Because of the peanuts and the butter, this is neither vegan nor peanut-free, which the ingredient list makes clear but the name does not.
Oyster mushrooms grilled and tossed in suya spice. It is a plant-based version of the Nigerian street food, and it works better than most meat substitutions do.
**The traditional suya spice contains ground peanuts, and this recipe includes them.** The source flags it and offers to leave them out, which is honest, but it is worth stating clearly, because a peanut allergy and a suya spice blend are a genuinely dangerous combination and the name gives no warning.
Suya proper is skewered beef, ram or chicken rubbed in yaji, the spice blend of ground roasted peanuts, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion powder and paprika, and grilled over open coals. It is Hausa in origin, from northern Nigeria, and it is sold across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Ghana and parts of Sudan. Kyinkyinga is the Ghanaian name, agashe the Sudanese.
Oyster mushrooms are the right substitution and not an arbitrary one. Shredded, they have a fibrous, layered structure that genuinely resembles pulled meat, they take on the dry rub readily, and they char well. Most vegetables do neither.
The source's method is very compressed, one step reads "put in a preheated medium", with the word oven missing, and has been filled out below.
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.
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.