Recettes

Plantain Chips

Green plantain sliced paper-thin and fried until crisp. It is a snack made across West Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and no single country is claimed for it. **One correction to the source, and it matters.** It says plantain chips are "also known as alloco, dodo, or chicharritas". Chicharritas is right, that is the Cuban and Puerto Rican name for exactly this. But alloco and dodo are not chips. Both are the West African dish of *ripe* plantain cut into thick pieces and fried soft: sweet, tender and yielding, the opposite of a crisp. Alloco is the Ivorian name and dodo the Nigerian one, and both have their own pages on this site. Conflating them with chips confuses two quite different foods. The distinction comes down to ripeness. Green plantain is starchy and barely sweet, and sliced thin it dries and crisps. Ripe plantain is full of sugar and moisture; sliced thin it burns before it crisps, and cut thick it fries soft. The source's own instructions are good, do not salt before frying, do not use overripe fruit, season while hot, but they are written as a list of tips rather than as a method. A method has been constructed.

35 minEasy

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Dukkah (Egyptian Nut and Spice Blend)

Dukkah is a dry Egyptian blend of toasted nuts, seeds and spices, pounded to a coarse crumb and eaten by dipping bread into olive oil and then into the dukkah. It is sold in cones of paper in Cairo's spice markets and made at home to family recipes. **It contains hazelnuts, which is not obvious from the name.** The name explains the texture. Duqqa comes from the Arabic for to pound, and the defining characteristic is that the mixture is crushed to a state that is neither a powder nor a paste, coarse enough to have texture in the mouth, fine enough to stick to oiled bread. Grind it too far and the nut oils release and it turns into a paste, which is the one thing it must not be. There is no fixed formula. Sesame, coriander, cumin, salt and pepper are near-universal; beyond that it varies by household and by vendor. A nineteenth-century account mentions marjoram, mint, za'atar and chickpeas; a 1978 report names nigella, millet flour and dried cheese; pine nuts, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds are more recent. The simplest market version is nothing but crushed mint, salt and pepper. Dry-toasting each element separately, as the method does, is not fussiness, nuts, sesame and whole spices all reach their best at different rates.

35 minEasyEgypt

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Kuli Kuli

Kuli kuli is a peanut snack eaten across Nigeria, Benin, northern Cameroon and Ghana, and it is one of the most widely recognised street foods in West Africa. It is made from peanuts alone, and the technique is what makes it: the oil is deliberately pressed out of the ground paste before the remaining solids are shaped and fried. That extraction is the point. Removing the oil leaves a dense, dry paste that fries into something genuinely crunchy rather than soft, and it also produces the frying oil as a by-product, so nothing is wasted. It is a piece of processing knowledge that predates industrial oil pressing and is still done by hand in Hausa communities in northern Nigeria, where the snack has its strongest association. It takes different shapes in different places: small sticks, rings, flat discs and irregular pieces are all standard, and the form varies by region and by seller. English names for it, groundnut cake and peanut snack among them, are approximations rather than translations. Kuli kuli is eaten on its own, mixed into garri with sugar and water, crumbled over salad, or served alongside fura and koko. Crushed to a powder it becomes the peanut component of suya spice, which is where most people outside the region encounter it without knowing.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

35 minMediumNigeria · West African

Recette de Blessing · Africook

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Klako, also written krakro, is a West African fritter made from mashed ripe plantain, and it is the plantain rather than the banana that matters. Ripe plantain has the sweetness and the starch to hold a fritter together; ordinary banana turns to liquid. The recipe here is savoury, seasoned with ginger, garlic, paprika and cayenne, which is the version most commonly eaten across Côte d'Ivoire, Togo and Ghana. That savoury treatment is worth stating clearly, because the sweet version is what most people expect from anything called a banana fritter. Both exist. Sweet versions with sugar, egg and milk are made across the region and across the Caribbean, and the two have travelled together, which is no accident: the same cooking crossed the Atlantic with enslaved West Africans, and Caribbean banana fritters are a direct relation rather than a coincidence. Plantain is abundant across the humid West African belt and very little of it is wasted. Fritters are one of several answers to fruit that has ripened past the point of frying in slices, alongside kelewele, the spiced fried plantain cubes of Ghana, and the many plantain and flour combinations across the region. They are made at home, sold at roadside stands, and eaten hot with the fingers, which is when they are at their best.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasyCôte d'Ivoire

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook