Recettes

African Pepper Sauce

Pepper sauce is the West African condiment: blended hot pepper cooked down in oil or water until thick, spooned onto anything that needs lifting. It goes with puff puff, grilled meat, fish and eggs, and there is scarcely a dish it is not served alongside somewhere in the region. What distinguishes it from a hot sauce elsewhere is what it does not have. There is no vinegar, no fermentation and usually no sugar. The base is pepper, salt, oil and often a stock cube, and the texture is thick and coarse rather than pourable. Recipes vary with the cook, but hot pepper is the constant, and habanero and scotch bonnet are the usual choices. Heat is adjustable and worth adjusting. Most West African pepper sauces are fierce, and this one uses three habaneros against four bell peppers, which is moderate by regional standards. Deseeding the habaneros, using fewer, or leaving them out entirely all work. The other choice is water or oil: water reduces away and gives a lighter sauce that keeps about a week; oil floats to the top when the sauce is done and seals it, which keeps it considerably longer. No country is named, and the sauce belongs to the whole region rather than to one.

30 minEasy

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Quick Egg Stew

Egg stew is tomatoes, onions and eggs cooked down together with pepper, and it is made across West Africa as a fast breakfast or light meal. This version carries two additions that place it more precisely: kobi and sardines. Kobi is salted, dried tilapia, a Ghanaian staple that is fried at the start so its salt and savour go into the oil before anything else joins it. It is one of the preserved fish that West African cooking relies on, alongside stockfish, smoked mackerel and dried prawn, and it gives a depth that fresh fish does not. Tinned sardines going in at the end is a common and thoroughly modern addition. The source names no country, and the kobi points to Ghana without settling it, so none is attributed here. What the dish is depends on how the eggs are treated: added and left mostly alone they set in curds through the tomato base; stirred continuously they disperse and the stew turns uniform. Both are made. It is eaten with bread, yam or plantain, and it is genuinely quick, which is much of the point of it.

25 minEasy

Recette de Debby · Africook

Miyan Kuka (Baobab Leaves Soup)

Miyan kuka is Hausa soup made from powdered baobab leaves, and it is the one Northern Nigerian dish that people warn you about before they serve it. It is dark green, mucilaginous and thick, and it does not look like anything anyone finds appetising on first sight. Northerners are entirely aware of this and serve it anyway, because the taste is not in dispute even where the appearance is. Kuka is the dried and ground leaf of the baobab, sold as a dark green powder in markets across the north and instantly recognisable to anyone who has shopped there. The powder is whisked into a seasoned stock at the very end of cooking, which is where the soup gets both its body and its drawing texture. It is also called luru. Nigeria's soups map closely onto its peoples, and miyan kuka is the north's entry in that map: Yoruba households have ewedu, Igbo have ofe ugba, Edo have bitter leaf soup, the riverine south has fisherman soup. Miyan kuka is eaten with tuwon shinkafa, tuwon dawa or any swallow, and it is one of the dishes that is genuinely better on the second day, which is a claim its cooks make readily and which holds up.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Beatrice · Africook

Okro Soup

Okro soup is among the quickest Nigerian soups to make and among the most eaten. Okra is chopped, cooked briefly in a stock built on assorted meat, dried fish and crayfish, finished with palm oil, and taken off the heat while it is still green. The whole thing takes minutes once the vegetables are cut, which is the trade off: most of the work is chopping. Okra is native to Africa, with its origin generally placed in the Ethiopian highlands, and it has spread from there across the continent and well beyond it. The draw it produces, the viscous quality that thickens the soup, is the entire point in West African cooking and the thing that people elsewhere often try to eliminate. Here it is what makes the soup work with a swallow: it slides. The names change across Nigeria. Ila asepo among the Yoruba, okwuru among the Igbo, miyan kubewa in Hausa, otong among the Efik, and okro generally. Potash, called kaun, is traditional for increasing the draw and is now optional and somewhat contested, with many cooks leaving it out entirely. Used at all it must be used sparingly, since too much kills the elasticity it is meant to increase. It is eaten with eba, fufu, semo, amala or pounded yam.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

25 minEasyNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · Africook