Recettes

Nigerian Egg Roll

The Nigerian egg roll is a whole hard cooked egg wrapped in a slightly sweet dough and deep fried, and it has nothing to do with the Chinese egg roll beyond the name. The closest comparison is a Scotch egg, with dough in place of sausage meat, and the resemblance ends at the structure. It is street food and travel food. Egg rolls are sold from glass cases at bus stops, from hawkers' trays in traffic, and from the small kiosks that cluster around Lagos offices, and they exist because they solve a specific problem: something substantial, cheap and self contained that can be eaten with one hand in a stationary car. Anyone who has spent time in Lagos traffic understands the appeal without further explanation. The dough is what makes it Nigerian rather than generic. Flour, baking powder, sugar, margarine and nutmeg produce something between a bread and a cake, faintly sweet against the plain salted egg inside, and that sweet and savoury combination is a Nigerian snack signature that also runs through buns, puff puff and chin chin. It is eaten with tea, fruit juice or chilled zobo, and it is substantial enough that people eat it as breakfast or lunch rather than as a snack.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

50 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Debby · Africook

Fluffy Pancakes

The thick, risen pancake is a North American and British form rather than an African one, and the source for this recipe says so directly: it describes itself as a basic UK recipe. It is included here as a plain reference version, not as a dish with a claim on the continent. That distinction matters because Africa has its own pancakes and they are not this. The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and deliberately savoury, carrying onion and ground pepper in the batter alongside the sugar. Hausa masa is a fermented rice cake, spongy and slightly sour, cooked in a pan of round wells. Ethiopian injera is a fermented teff flatbread that functions as a plate. Each of those is a distinct thing with its own technique and its own place at a table. What this recipe offers is the baking powder raised, egg and milk enriched, butter cooked pancake that most of the world now recognises from breakfast menus. It is genuinely good and genuinely simple, and there is no reason not to make it. There is also no reason to describe it as African cooking, and the honest position is to present it as what it is.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Nigerian Buns

Nigerian buns are fried dough balls with a crunchy outer crust and a soft, cake like interior. They sit alongside puff puff and chin chin in the small group of fried snacks that account for most of what Nigerians eat between meals, and the differences between the three are understood precisely by anyone who grew up with them. Buns are the rich one. Where puff puff is yeast raised and made from almost nothing, buns use baking powder for lift and include egg, butter and milk, which produces a denser, sweeter, more substantial thing with a genuinely crunchy shell. They also absorb less oil in the frying, which is a real practical advantage and a point people make in their favour. They are everywhere: sold from roadside trays and by hawkers, made at home for children after school, brought to parties and picnics, and eaten with tea at breakfast. The flavouring is open, with nutmeg the most common and cinnamon and vanilla both standard, and every household has a version that is slightly sweeter or slightly denser than the next. They are best hot and are still good at room temperature, which is most of what a snack needs to be.

35 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Beatrice · Africook

Tapalapa

Tapalapa is a West African bread: a dense, chewy loaf with a firm crust, baked long and scored across the top, and sold from roadside ovens and small bakeries rather than from supermarkets. It is bought fresh in the morning, torn rather than sliced, and eaten with whatever the household has. Its role is that of daily bread in the most literal sense. In the countries where it is baked, the tapalapa loaf is a breakfast item, split and filled with beans, egg, fried fish or a spread, and it is also what appears alongside a stew at other times of day. Baked in a wood fired oven, which is how most of it is still produced, it takes on a crust and a faint smokiness that a domestic oven does not reproduce. The bread belongs to a wider West African tradition of European style leavened loaves that were absorbed into local baking and then developed independently, arriving somewhere quite distinct from any European original. Tapalapa is denser and chewier than a baguette, keeps considerably better, and is built to hold a filling without collapsing. The countries of the region that bake it treat it as their own, and the question of exactly where it began is not settled.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

2 hrMedium

Recette de Laila · Africook