Recettes Senegal

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

15 minEasySenegal · Ivoirian

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 15 minMediumSenegal

Recette de Blessing · Africook

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.

50 minEasySenegal

Recette de Blessing · Africook

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.

1 hr 10 minMediumSenegal

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook