Recettes

Pan-Seared Salmon

A salmon steak seasoned with Cajun spice and paprika, then cooked in butter until the outside colours and the inside stays just short of firm. No country is claimed and none applies: pan-searing is a technique rather than a tradition, and salmon is a cold-water North Atlantic and Pacific fish with no African tradition attached to it. The contributor is South African, and the Cajun seasoning is the giveaway that this is a contemporary home-cooking recipe rather than an inherited one. Cajun spice blends are Louisiana in origin and reached South African kitchens through the same route as most global pantry seasonings. There is one technical point worth stating clearly, because the source gets it slightly wrong. It has you melt the butter over low heat, then sear. Searing needs high heat, and butter alone burns before it gets there, because its milk solids scorch well below searing temperature. A neutral oil to start, with butter added towards the end for flavour and basting, is the standard way round this. Left as written, you will steam the fish rather than sear it. This page carries the traffic on this dish, so it is the one being kept even though its slug ends in a duplicate suffix.

17 minEasy

Recette de Cedukwazi Nhlengethwa · Africook

How to Cook Couscous

How to prepare instant couscous: boiling water or stock poured over, covered, left to steam, then fluffed. This is a technique page for a staple ingredient rather than a recipe for a dish, and it is filed as such. Couscous is North African, specifically Berber in origin, and it is a staple across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Its status was recognised by UNESCO in 2020, when the knowledge and practices around couscous were inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in a joint submission by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. It is not a grain, despite looking like one. Couscous is pasta, durum wheat semolina moistened, rolled into tiny granules and dried. Three sizes are common: Moroccan, the smallest; Israeli or pearl couscous, about the size of peppercorns; and Lebanese, the largest. The traditional method has nothing to do with pouring boiling water on. Couscous is steamed, usually more than once, in the upper chamber of a couscoussier over a stew whose vapours flavour it as it cooks. That is how it is made for a proper meal in North Africa and the results are much lighter. Almost all couscous sold in supermarkets is pre-steamed and dried, which is why the rehydration method here works.

20 minEasyMorocco

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Wasawasa

Wasawasa is made from yam peelings. Not yam, but the skin that most kitchens discard: dried, ground into flour, and steamed into a coarse grain that eats something like couscous. It is a dish that exists because nothing was wasted, and it has outlived the scarcity that produced it to become a food people specifically want. It belongs to Dagbon and the wider north of Ghana, and it is eaten in Burkina Faso and other parts of West Africa under related names. In Tamale and across the northern region it is street food and household food at once, sold with a hot pepper sauce and fried fish and often garnished with cabbage, carrot and sliced potato. The steaming happens twice, with a wash in between, which is the technical heart of the dish and the part that cannot be shortened. The flour is moistened until it forms small lumps, steamed, washed, drained, and steamed again on low heat, and only then is it dressed with groundnut oil and salt. That second steam is what turns it from damp meal into separate grains. It is served with beans, pasta or salad as well as the standard pepper sauce and fish, and it makes a full plate from an ingredient that costs almost nothing.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hrMediumGhana

Recette de Deborah · Africook

Angwa Moo

Angwa moo is oiled rice, and the Akan name says it plainly. Onions are browned in oil, rice goes in and is fried briefly, then water is added and the whole thing cooks together. The result is golden, faintly sweet from the caramelised onion, and unlike fried rice in one important respect: the rice is raw when it enters the oil rather than cooked and cooled. Ghanaians treat it as the emergency dish, and they are cheerful about saying so. It is what a child cooks when a parent is not home, what a young man living alone makes because it needs almost nothing, and what gets made when there is no time and no plan. That does not make it lesser. The browning of the onion is doing real work, and a well made angwa moo has a depth that its ingredient list does not predict. The traditional accompaniment is ground pepper made in an earthenware asanka, with tinned sardines or fried eggs alongside, and that combination is the version most Ghanaians picture. The salted beef known as tolobeef, cured at home over two days, is the more considered addition. The crisp scorched layer at the bottom of the pot is prized and fought over, which is the case for rice dishes across the continent, and the way to get it is to let the rice finish in its own steam without stirring.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

40 minEasyGhana · West African

Recette de Jennifer · Africook