Recettes

Thieboudienne

Thieboudienne is the national dish of Senegal and the origin point of the rice tradition that spread along the whole West African coast. The name is Wolof and means rice and fish, which understates it considerably: the dish involves a stuffed whole fish, a long braise of tomato and vegetables, and a rice cooked in the liquid all of that produced. Its history reaches the modern table through oral tradition rather than through documents, and it carries more than one account. One attributes the dish to the city of Saint-Louis in the nineteenth century, where a version known as thieboudienne Penda Mbaye was prepared. Another holds that it emerged in a colonial governor's kitchen when rice was substituted for barley during a shortage. Senegalese tradition names Penda Mbaye, and that named attribution matters in Senegal, where the dish is held as an inheritance with an author rather than an anonymous custom. It is eaten from a large communal platter, each person working the section in front of them, and it is what opens a significant family lunch. Its relatives are everywhere: riz gras in Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea, jollof rice across Anglophone West Africa, and Savannah red rice in the American South, which many hold was carried there and adapted by Creole cooks.

Senegal1 hr 15 minFoodChef

Ngalakh

Ngalakh is Senegal's Easter dish, and the sentence needs the qualification that in Senegal Easter is not primarily about chocolate or eggs. It is about ngalakh: a thick millet porridge bound with peanut paste and baobab fruit, made in quantity and sent out of the house. That last part is the dish. Ngalakh is prepared by Christian households and distributed to neighbours, friends and colleagues, most of whom are Muslim, in a country where the two communities live closely and intermarry. It is also served at Korité, marking the end of Ramadan, moving in the other direction. A dessert that exists to be given away across a religious line is doing something more than feeding people, and Senegalese describe it directly as an expression of teranga, the national value of hospitality and sharing. Its base is thiakry, the medium grain millet semolina, as distinct from thiéré, which is finer. The peanut paste supplies richness and the bouye, the powdered pulp of the baobab fruit, supplies a tart acidity that cuts it. That pairing of heavy and sharp is what makes ngalakh work where a sweet porridge alone would not. It is eaten cold, from large bowls, dusted with sugar.

SenegalBlessing

Dakhine

Dakhine is a Senegalese rice dish built on peanut paste, meat and tomato, and it belongs to the evening. Where thieboudienne opens the significant family lunch, dakhine is what Senegalese households eat at night, which gives it a domestic, unceremonious character that the country's more famous dishes do not have. Its economy is part of its identity. Rice, oil, peanut paste and vegetables are inexpensive and available everywhere in Senegal, and dakhine is understood as a dish that feeds a household well without costing much. It is also known as dakhine mbeup, and its closest relative is maafe, the peanut stew of the wider Mandinka region, from which dakhine differs by cooking the rice in the peanut sauce rather than serving the two separately. The rice matters. Senegalese cooks use a broken rice and take it to al dente rather than soft, so the grains stay distinct in a sauce that is deliberately kept loose. A dakhine that has gone dry is considered a failure. It is spiced with enough chilli that some Senegalese find it heavy for an evening meal, which is a complaint people make about a dish they nonetheless keep making.

SenegalBlessing

Maafe

Maafe is the groundnut stew of West Africa, and its name comes from the Mandinka word for sauce. That plainness is accurate: maafe is a peanut sauce, thickened and enriched until it coats meat and vegetables, and it is one of the most recognisable things the region cooks. It traces to the Mandinka and Bambara of Mali, where it is called tigadegena in Bamanankan and domodah in Mandinka, and it spread from there into Senegal and across the rest of West Africa. Each country renamed it: maafe in Senegal, sauce d'arachide in Côte d'Ivoire, domoda in the Gambia. It also crossed the Atlantic, and peanut soups in parts of the American South carry a clear family resemblance. Its history has an economic layer. Peanut stews existed before the peanut, made with indigenous groundnuts, and the arrival of the American peanut in the 16th century gave them a better crop. What entrenched maafe was the colonial period, when groundnut cultivation was expanded enormously for export and West African kitchens found themselves with far more peanuts than they had previously used. A dish partly shaped by a cash crop economy is not a diminished dish, and Senegalese eat maafe communally from a shared platter with rice, which is the ordinary form of a Senegalese meal.

Senegal1 hr 20 minFoodChef

Thiakry, a Senegalese dessert of millet couscous with sweetened yogurt, served cold

Thiakry Couscous

Thiakry is millet couscous stirred into sweetened yogurt and milk, served cold, and it is one of the most widely eaten sweet things in Senegal and the Gambia. It is also written thiakri, chakery, caakiri and degue, and the spelling shifts with the language and the writer while the dish stays the same. Millet is the reason it exists. It is one of the principal grains of Senegal, grown across the drier interior where rice does not do well, and thiakry is among the most common things made from it. The grain is milled to a couscous and steamed, then cooled and folded into the dairy. In Dakar it is sold in every grocery store, which is a fair measure of how ordinary a food it is. It is eaten at breakfast as readily as at the end of a meal, which puts it in the same category as yogurt everywhere: sweet, cold, and not confined to dessert. Raisins, mango, grated coconut and chopped almonds are all standard on top, and vanilla and nutmeg are the usual flavourings. Its close relation ngalakh, made with peanut paste and baobab, is the elaborated festival version of the same base. Thiakry is the everyday one.

Senegal15 minCuisine228

Senegalese Fataya

Fataya are Senegalese fried pastries, filled, folded into half moons and sold from small tables at the roadside across the country. They are cheap, they are everywhere, and they are made and sold overwhelmingly by women working from stands they set up themselves, which is a fair description of a great deal of Senegal's street food economy. The filling is where Senegal shows itself. Yassa is the base, the onion, lemon, mustard and peanut oil preparation that is one of the country's defining flavours, applied to fish or chicken. Fish is the more common street filling, reflecting a coastline that supplies the national diet. To that Senegalese cooks bring french fries and fried egg, which sound like additions from somewhere else and are in fact standard, supplying the fat and richness that the lean fish does not have. They are finished with ketchup and hot sauce poured over the top, which means no two bites are quite the same. Fataya sit in the same family as the fried filled pastries found across West Africa and beyond it, and what makes them Senegalese is entirely the yassa. The marinade is worth knowing on its own: sweet, tangy and slightly hot, and used across the region on chicken and fish well outside this dish.

Senegal1 hr 15 minBlessing

Thiébou Yapp

Thiébou yapp is the meat version of Senegal's defining rice dish. Where thieboudienne uses fish, thiébou yapp uses beef or lamb, and the Wolof name says so directly: thiébou for rice, yapp for meat, in the same construction that gives thiébou jen its name from jen, fish. The method is the same in structure. Meat is marinated, browned, and simmered in a seasoned broth; the rice then goes into that broth and takes all of it up. What holds the dish together is nokoss, the Senegalese seasoning base of onion, parsley, garlic, chilli and bell pepper pounded together, which is used as a marinade for the meat and stirred back into the broth in stages. It is a weekday dish in a way thieboudienne is not. Thieboudienne is what opens a significant family lunch and requires a whole stuffed fish and a full braise of vegetables; thiébou yapp is quicker, cheaper and more forgiving, and it is what appears when the household is not marking an occasion. It is served on a large communal platter, dressed at the table with an onion and vegetable sauce, sliced tomato and hard cooked egg.

Senegal2 hr 5 minBlessing

Bissap

Bissap is the Wolof name for Hibiscus sabdariffa and for the deep red drink made from its dried calyces. It is the most widely drunk thing in Senegal after water, sold from every restaurant, supermarket and street corner, and made at home by buying the dried flowers at the market and steeping them in hot water with sugar. Its position has something to do with religion. Senegal is overwhelmingly Muslim, alcohol plays almost no part in social life, and the result is a genuinely developed culture of non alcoholic drinks: bissap alongside ginger, tamarind and bouye, made from the fruit of the baobab. These are not soft drinks in the Western sense of an afterthought. They are what people offer guests and what they drink at any hour. The same flower is drunk across a great deal of the world under other names: zobo in Nigeria, sorrel in the Caribbean, karkade in Egypt and Sudan, agua de jamaica in Mexico. What varies is the flavouring. Senegalese bissap commonly carries mint, and ginger, pineapple, passion fruit and lime all appear. Ginger divides opinion, since a heavy hand overpowers the hibiscus. It is served very cold and generally over ice, which is not a preference but a requirement in the climate it belongs to.

SenegalBlessing

Ndambé

Ndambé is a Senegalese black eyed pea stew, and its most recognisable form is not a bowl at all. It is loaded into a split baguette and eaten as a sandwich from a roadside stand, which is what most Senegalese picture when the word comes up. The baguette is a colonial inheritance that Senegal has thoroughly made its own. French bread arrived with colonial administration and is now baked and eaten across the country in quantities that have nothing to do with France, and the ndambé sandwich is one of the clearest examples of what happened to it: a West African bean stew, spiced with chilli and thickened with tomato, packed into a European loaf and sold for very little money. It is breakfast and dinner food rather than lunch, and Senegalese describe it as winter food, which in Senegal means the cooler months rather than anything a European would call winter. Sweet potato goes in in some households, and meat, usually beef or lamb, in others, though the stew is entirely good without either. Beyond the sandwich it is served with rice, couscous or on its own.

SenegalBlessing

Banana Glace

Banana glace is a Senegalese dessert of frozen banana cream spread over fresh banana and finished with chopped nuts and candied fruit. It is a chilled, rich, decorated dish, and it belongs to a side of Senegalese eating that gets less attention than the country's rice dishes. That side is worth naming. Senegal has a substantial tradition of desserts and sweet drinks, from thiakry and ngalakh to bissap and bouye, and a good deal of it sits alongside a French influence in presentation and technique that the country absorbed and adapted. Banana glace shows that clearly: the assembly is composed and plated in a way that reads as European, while the base is a fruit that grows abundantly across the region. It is served with a small cup of strong black coffee or espresso, which is the detail that places it most precisely. Coffee served that way after a dessert is a habit of the Senegalese urban table rather than of the village, and banana glace belongs to restaurants, hotels and household occasions rather than to everyday cooking. The toppings, peanuts, slivered almonds, glacé cherries, angelica and raisins, are the kind of decoration that signals a dish is being made for guests.

SenegalNympha

Jollof Couscous

Jollof couscous applies the jollof method to North African couscous, and it sits at the meeting point of two quite separate West and North African traditions. The tomato and pepper base is built as it would be for jollof rice; the grain is steamed couscous rather than long grain rice. Couscous itself is North African, rolled from semolina and traditionally steamed several times in a couscoussier until it is light and separate rather than gummy. In Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia it is served with a spiced vegetable stew and meat, which is a different proposition entirely from what happens here. Its texture is often compared to attiéké, the fermented cassava of Côte d'Ivoire, though the two share only appearance. Jollof itself is contested territory between Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and beyond, and applying it to couscous is a modern move rather than an inherited one. The source attributes this version to Senegal, which is where the jollof tradition originates in the thieboudienne of the Wolof people, though the framing in the original text is Nigerian. It is quick food, twenty minutes from start to finish, and it is honest about being an adaptation.

Senegal30 minCuisine228

Vermicelle Poulet

Vermicelle poulet is Senegalese celebration food that happens to be very easy to make, which is an unusual combination. Broken rice vermicelli is toasted in butter and steamed, and braised chicken in a mustard and onion sauce is served over it. That is the whole dish. It appears at weddings, baptisms and the gatherings that mark occasions, and it is found in the most modest Senegalese households and in the country's best restaurants without much changing between them. Its status comes from the vermicelli rather than the technique, since imported wheat and rice noodles carried a cost and a cachet that plain rice did not. The sauce is the Senegalese signature. Yellow mustard and onion cooked down together, sharpened with vinegar, is the same base that carries chicken yassa, and it is one of the most recognisable flavour combinations in the country's cooking. The mustard is not a French borrowing so much as a French ingredient absorbed completely into a Senegalese idiom. Thickened lightly with flour and spooned over toasted vermicelli, it makes a dish that looks like far more work than it is.

Senegal50 minBlessing

Senegalese Chicken Yassa

Chicken Yassa is one of Senegal's most internationally celebrated dishes, a deeply flavoured stew where chicken is marinated in an aggressive mixture of lemon juice, mustard, and onions, grilled or seared until charred, then slowly cooked with an enormous quantity of caramelised onions until they collapse into a rich, tangy, slightly sweet sauce. The dish is a masterclass in the power of onions as a flavour base. Five or six large onions per chicken is not unusual, they cook down dramatically and transform into a completely different thing: sweet, golden, and complex. The lemon keeps the sauce bright and the mustard adds a subtle depth. Yassa is eaten across Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau and wherever Senegalese communities have settled globally.

SenegalNympha

Bouye juice, a Senegalese drink made from soaked baobab fruit pulp

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Bouye is the Wolof name for the fruit of the baobab, and bouye juice is what Senegal makes from it. The fruit hangs in hard woody pods on the most recognisable tree of the African savannah, and inside is a dry, chalky white pulp with a distinctly sour, citrus-like flavour. Baobab has been a staple across the Sahel for centuries, in Senegal and well beyond, and every part of the tree gets used: leaves as a vegetable and thickener, seeds pressed for oil, bark for rope. The English name for the fruit, monkey bread, describes the pulp reasonably well. In Hausa the fruit is kwalba, which is the name that appears in this particular recipe. The method is soaking rather than juicing. The pulp is left in water for around an hour to soften, worked with a whisk to release as much as possible, then strained. What happens next varies: drunk plain and sweetened it is bouye juice, while blending it with nono, the fermented milk of northern Nigeria and the Sahel, or with yoghurt, gives the thicker milkshake version this recipe describes. Both are drunk cold, and it freezes into ice lollies, which is how children across the region most often have it.

Senegal1 hr 10 minBlessing

Dibi (Senegalese Grilled Lamb)

Dibi is Senegalese grilled lamb, sold from street stalls and wood-fired grills and served in bite sized pieces on paper with a mustard and onion sauce. It is one of the country's defining street foods and it is eaten with the fingers. The same dish exists across the region under a different name. In Guinea and the Gambia it is called afra, and the format is the same: meat seasoned and grilled over wood, hacked into pieces, smothered in onions and served in a brown paper bag that catches the drippings. A French baguette turns it into a sandwich, which is how a great many people eat it. The sauce is the Senegalese signature and it is the same mustard-and-onion base that carries chicken yassa. Onion is cooked down slowly in oil with grainy French mustard until soft and lightly browned, then loosened with water to a spoonable consistency. It is tangy rather than hot, and it cuts the fat of the grilled lamb. Attiéké, fried plantain or chips go alongside, and while dibi is filed as an appetizer it is substantial enough to be a whole meal, which is how it is usually eaten.

Senegal1 hrBlessing

Yassa Fish and Shrimp

Poisson yassa is the fish version of Senegal's best known dish, and it works on the same principle as chicken yassa: a marinade of lemon, mustard, garlic and onion that becomes the sauce, with a very large quantity of onion cooked down into it. Yassa comes from the Casamance region in southern Senegal and is now made across the country and throughout the Senegalese diaspora. The mustard is a French ingredient absorbed entirely into a Senegalese idiom, and the resemblance the source draws to a French sauce à l'onion is fair as far as it goes, though yassa is sharper and carries far more onion. Four large onions to two and a half pounds of fish is the ratio, and it is not a mistake. The onions cook down into a soft, tangy mass that is as much the dish as the fish is. The technique is straightforward: marinate, cook the fish and set it aside, cook the onions in the leftover marinade, then return the fish to warm through in the sauce. Shrimp can go in alongside. It is served with rice most often, though this version suggests potatoes.

Senegal40 minCuisine228

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Bassi salté is Senegalese millet couscous served with a meat and vegetable sauce, studded with raisins, chickpeas and white beans. Its full name is thiéré bassi salté, and it is one of the most demanding dishes in the Senegalese repertoire. The grain is the point of difference. This is not wheat couscous but thiakry, made from millet, the ancestral West African cereal, cultivated in the Sahel for thousands of years before wheat or maize arrived. That matters both culturally and practically: millet couscous is naturally gluten-free, and it needs a binder, which is where lalo comes in. Lalo is powdered baobab leaf, and it holds the steamed grains together in a way that wheat gluten would do on its own. It is festival food. Bassi salté is traditionally eaten at Tamkharit, the Senegalese observance of Ashura, and the effort involved, steaming the couscous twice, building the sauce over hours, forming the diaga meatballs separately, is part of what makes it appropriate to the occasion. Its defining flavour is the balance between savoury and sweet. Raisins and sometimes dates go in alongside the mutton and root vegetables, which is deliberate rather than incidental. The source's ingredient list is badly scrambled and its sauce timing is not credible; both are flagged below.

Senegal2 hr 45 minBlessing

Cinq centimes, Senegalese cookies topped with peanut butter and chopped peanuts

Cinq Centimes (Senegalese Peanut Cookies)

Cinq centimes are vanilla and cinnamon sugar cookies topped with peanut butter and chopped peanuts. They are sold in markets across Senegal, particularly in Dakar, and they are named after money: cinq centimes is French for five cents, a reference to their original small size, like coins. **These contain peanuts twice over, as a topping and as chopped nuts, and neither appears in the name.** The peanut is not incidental to Senegal. Groundnuts were the colonial cash crop that reshaped the country's agriculture under French rule, and they remain central to both the economy and the cooking: mafe, the peanut stew, is close to a national dish. A peanut-topped cookie sold for coins in a Dakar market sits squarely in that context rather than being a novelty. The base is a plain butter and sugar cookie with cinnamon and vanilla, chilled before rolling. Chilling matters more than it sounds, cold dough holds its shape as it bakes rather than spreading, which is what keeps these small and neat. One error in the source: its method gives an oven setting ten times higher than any domestic oven reaches, which is a misplaced decimal point. The corrected figure is used in the method below.

Senegal1 hr 50 minBlessing

Crispy fried beef empanadas garnished with coriander

Crispy Beef Empanadas

Discs of short pastry filled with seasoned beef mince, sealed and fried until blistered and crisp. Empanadas are Spanish in origin and are now most strongly associated with Latin America, where nearly every country has its own version. The name comes from empanar, Spanish for to wrap in bread. The form travelled with Spanish and Portuguese colonisation and took root everywhere it landed: Argentine empanadas baked and filled with beef and olives, Chilean pino with egg and olives, Colombian versions made with maize dough and fried, and Filipino ones sweetened. The source is right that the family extends to the Philippines and Indonesia, though describing empanadas as European Philippines is confused phrasing. Africa has its own members of the same broad family of filled savoury pastries, and several are on this site, Nigerian meat pie, Senegalese fataya, East African sambusa. They are relatives rather than the same thing, and the Nigerian meat pie in particular is close enough that the two are often mistaken for each other. The one genuinely useful technique here is resting the dough balls for an hour or two before pressing them out. Rested gluten relaxes, so the rounds hold their shape instead of springing back. The source's ingredient list is scrambled and has been rebuilt from its method.

Senegal1 hr 10 minCuisine228

Salatu niebe, a Senegalese black-eyed pea salad with diced vegetables and lime

Salatu Niebe (Senegalese Black-Eyed Pea Salad)

Salatu niebe is cooked black-eyed peas tossed with finely diced cucumber, tomato, bell pepper, spring onion and chilli, dressed with lime juice and olive oil. It is Senegalese and is usually served after the main meal rather than before it. Niebe is the Wolof word for black-eyed peas, and the bean is not an import. Cowpeas were domesticated in West Africa thousands of years ago and travelled to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, which is why black-eyed peas are as fundamental to Southern American cooking as they are to Senegalese. The direction of that journey is frequently reversed in the telling. The technique is in the cutting. Everything except the peas is diced very finely, so each spoonful carries a bit of everything rather than separate components. That is what makes it read as a composed salad rather than beans with vegetables in. It travels and keeps well, which is why it is a standard dish for feeding a crowd, made ahead, it improves as the peas absorb the lime and oil. The source credits Chef Pierre Thiam with popularising it outside Senegal, and that attribution is well founded. Its ingredient list omits the olive oil and parsley that its own description requires.

Senegal50 minBlessing

Senegalese Sombi

Sombi is Senegalese rice pudding made with coconut milk rather than dairy, rice simmered slowly with coconut milk, sugar and a little salt until it thickens. Its simplicity is the reason it is so widely made. Four ingredients, one pot, and no technique beyond stirring and patience. It is a household dessert rather than a restaurant one, and it appears at family meals, at celebrations and during Ramadan. Being made with coconut milk rather than cow's milk matters practically as well as culturally. It keeps better in a hot climate without refrigeration, and it is suitable for the many adults who do not digest lactose well. The salt is not incidental. A small amount sharpens the sweetness and stops the pudding tasting flat, and leaving it out is the most common reason a home-made sombi disappoints. It is served warm most often, though it is also eaten chilled in very hot weather, and it is usually garnished with toasted coconut chips. Sombi belongs to a broad family of coconut rice puddings found wherever rice and coconut are both grown, from West Africa through South and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.

SenegalBlessing

Recettes Senegal

Jollof Couscous

Senegalese Sombi

Ndambé

Banana Glace

Thiébou Yapp

Ngalakh

Thieboudienne

Maafe

Dakhine

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Plats emblématiques : Senegal

Recettes Senegal les plus populaires

Thieboudienne

Ngalakh

Dakhine

Maafe

Thiakry Couscous

Senegalese Fataya

Thiébou Yapp

Bissap

Ndambé

Banana Glace

Jollof Couscous

Vermicelle Poulet

Senegalese Chicken Yassa

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Dibi (Senegalese Grilled Lamb)

Yassa Fish and Shrimp

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Cinq Centimes (Senegalese Peanut Cookies)

Crispy Beef Empanadas

Salatu Niebe (Senegalese Black-Eyed Pea Salad)

Senegalese Sombi

Recettes Senegal

Recettes à la une

Jollof Couscous

Thiébou Yapp

Ngalakh

Thieboudienne

Maafe

Dakhine

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Plats emblématiques : Senegal

Recettes Senegal les plus populaires

Thieboudienne

Ngalakh

Dakhine

Maafe

Thiakry Couscous

Senegalese Fataya

Thiébou Yapp

Bissap

Ndambé

Banana Glace

Jollof Couscous

Vermicelle Poulet

Senegalese Chicken Yassa

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Dibi (Senegalese Grilled Lamb)

Yassa Fish and Shrimp

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Cinq Centimes (Senegalese Peanut Cookies)

Crispy Beef Empanadas

Salatu Niebe (Senegalese Black-Eyed Pea Salad)

Senegalese Sombi