Recettes

Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.

Filtres actifs

Matbucha (Moroccan Tomato and Pepper Dip)

Matbucha is roasted peppers and tomatoes cooked down slowly with garlic and paprika into a thick, dark, jammy dip. It is Moroccan Jewish in origin and is now eaten across Israel and the wider Middle East as a mezze staple. The name says what it is: matbucha means cooked salad in Arabic, which describes both the dish and the crucial technique. This is not a fresh salsa but something reduced by half over an hour or more, until the water has cooked out and the peppers and tomatoes have concentrated into something closer to a preserve. Rushing that stage gives you a thin tomato sauce, which is a different and lesser thing. Its journey is worth recording. Matbucha travelled from Morocco to Israel with Jewish immigrants in the mid-twentieth century, and it is now so established there that it is sold in every supermarket. In Morocco it is served as part of a mezze spread; in Israel it is understood as an appetizer. Same dish, slightly different place at the table. Red peppers rather than green is not incidental. The source notes that green peppers turn bitter in matbucha, which is correct, red peppers are ripe and sweet and reduce into something quite different. It freezes well, which is why the recipe makes three jars.

1 hr 25 minEasyMorocco

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Voir la recette →

How to Make Browning Sauce

Browning is brown sugar cooked until it is almost black, then let down with boiling water into a dark, bitter syrup. It is a Caribbean staple, Jamaican, Trinidadian and West Indian generally, used to colour and deepen stews, curries, gravies and cakes. **This page had no recipe card in the source.** The ingredients and method below are reconstructed from its article, and that is flagged. The point of it is that it is not sweet. Sugar taken far past caramel, to the point where it looks burnt, has lost most of its sweetness and gained a deep bitterness, and that bitterness is what gives Caribbean brown stew chicken and oxtail their characteristic colour and savoury depth. Stopping at golden caramel gives you something quite different and considerably less useful. Two safety points that the article does not stress enough. Sugar at this stage is well above the boiling point of water and will cause serious burns on contact. And adding water to it causes violent spattering, so the pan should come off the heat, the water should be boiling rather than cold, and it should go in slowly and at arm's length. A teaspoon or two per dish is the right dose. It is concentrated, and too much makes food taste burnt.

20 minMedium

Recette de Debby · Africook

Voir la recette →

Quick Pizza Sauce

Tinned tomato sauce sweetened with honey and cooked down briefly. No country is claimed; it is a shortcut sauce for homemade pizza. This is the shortest recipe in the entire archive, two ingredients, and it is worth being honest about what that means. The source's own article promises olive oil and garlic; neither appears in the ingredient list or the method. What is actually written is tinned tomato sauce with honey stirred in and simmered for seven minutes. That will make a perfectly serviceable pizza sauce, and it will taste of tinned tomato and honey. The honey is doing a real job, though, and it is worth understanding rather than dismissing. Tinned tomatoes are noticeably acidic, and a small amount of sugar counteracts that acidity rather than making the sauce sweet, the same reason Italian cooks put a pinch of sugar into a long-cooked tomato sauce. Two tablespoons in a tin is more than a pinch, so taste as you go. The seven-minute cook is the other half of it. Tinned tomato sauce is thin, and reducing it slightly gives you something that sits on the dough rather than soaking into it. Olive oil, garlic, oregano and salt would improve it considerably and are all in the source's own description.

15 minEasy

Recette de Sandynanayaa · Africook

Voir la recette →

Piri Piri Sauce

Bird's eye chillies blended with red pepper, garlic, oregano, bay, lemon and vinegar into a hot sauce. No single country is claimed, and there is a good reason for that. **The source's origin claim is wrong and needs correcting.** It says piri piri originated in the Caribbean. It did not. Chillies as a genus came from the Americas and were carried worldwide by Portuguese and Spanish traders after 1492, but the piri piri chilli itself is what those chillies became after they were planted in Portuguese southern Africa, chiefly Mozambique and Angola, where the small, fiercely hot bird's eye variety developed. The name is Swahili: *pili pili* simply means pepper, doubled for emphasis. That history is why the sauce belongs on this site rather than in a European section. It is a genuinely African product that travelled back to Portugal, not a European one imported into Africa. Its association with Portuguese and South African restaurant chains has obscured that. The source also says the English call it piri piri while the Portuguese call it peri peri. Both spellings are used in both languages; the variation is transliteration, not nationality. The method mentions onion, which appears nowhere in the ingredients.

15 minEasy

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Voir la recette →

Recettes