Recettes

Easy Nigerian Fried Rice

Nigerian fried rice is party food, and it sits beside jollof rice on the table at every celebration where both appear. Where jollof is red and built on a cooked tomato and pepper base, fried rice is pale gold, coloured by curry powder rather than tomato, and studded with diced vegetables and liver. It is a Nigerian dish rather than a Chinese one, despite the shared name and the soy and oyster sauces that have entered the modern version. The rice is parboiled in seasoned meat stock so it takes flavour before it is ever fried, which is the opposite order to Chinese fried rice, and the vegetables go in raw at the end so they keep their bite and colour. Fried rice spice, sold as its own blend in Nigerian markets, is the thing to look for; curry powder is a different profile and contributors are firm on the point. Liver is the traditional protein and the part most often left out abroad. Fried until firm and diced small, it gives a mineral depth that nothing else in the dish supplies. Shrimp, chicken and beef all appear alongside or instead. It is served with fried plantain, moi moi, coleslaw and chicken, and at a Nigerian party it is served with jollof rather than instead of it.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

50 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Amako Blessing · Africook

Biryani

Biryani is a layered rice dish of Persian and South Asian origin that has been part of South African cooking for well over a century, and the South African versions are now traditions in their own right. The name traces to Persian, birinj biriyan, fried rice, and the dish as it is recognised today developed among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent. It reached South Africa with indentured labourers brought to Natal from India from the 1860s, and separately through the Cape Malay community, whose roots lie in the people brought from the Indonesian archipelago and South Asia under Dutch colonial rule. What emerged is distinct. Durban biryani, the best known, is typically cooked with lentils and potatoes layered through the rice, and it is spiced with the chilli-forward masalas that also produced bunny chow. Cape Malay versions run sweeter, using cinnamon, cardamom and sometimes raisins, reflecting a different spice tradition entirely. The method is what makes it biryani rather than a spiced rice. Meat and rice are partly cooked separately, then layered and finished together under a sealed lid so the steam carries the spice up through the grains, dum, in the South Asian term. It is celebration food in South Africa as much as in South Asia: Eid, weddings, and large family gatherings.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

MediumSouth Africa

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Liberian Jollof Rice

Jollof rice belongs to the whole of West Africa, and every country that claims it claims it as its own. The Liberian version sits inside that family without being anyone's copy. It is a tomato rice, built on long grain parboiled grains, sweetened by onion and sweet pepper, sharpened with garlic and ginger, and carrying a smokiness that Liberian cooks treat as the mark of a pot done properly. Rice is the centre of the Liberian diet rather than an accompaniment to it, and a one pot rice that can be built around whatever protein a household has, or around no protein at all, earns its place in an everyday kitchen as readily as at a gathering. It feeds a room from a single vessel, which is part of why it survives. Across West Africa the jollof pot is argued over with genuine feeling, and the loudest of those arguments runs between Nigeria and Ghana. Liberia is rarely named in that particular fight. That says less about the quality of the Liberian pot than about who is holding the microphone.

1 hr 20 minEasyLiberia · West African

Recette de Laila · Africook

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 15 minHardSenegal

Recette de FoodChef · Africook