Recettes

Boerewors Stew

Boerewors is South African sausage, and the name is Afrikaans: boer for farmer, wors for sausage. It is coarsely minced beef, sometimes with pork or lamb, seasoned with toasted coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, and it is made in one continuous coil rather than in links. Its identity is protected in law. South African regulation sets out what may be sold as boerewors, including a minimum meat content and a cap on other ingredients, which is an unusual level of legislative attention for a sausage and a fair measure of how seriously the country takes it. That regulation is also why boerewors is genuinely hard to buy outside South Africa and why South Africans abroad end up making their own. The sausage belongs to the braai above all, grilled in its coil over coals. This stew is what happens to it indoors: cut into pieces, browned, and simmered with tomato, garlic and spices into something closer to a weeknight dish. Boerewors is also eaten with pap and a tomato and onion sauce, which is the standard plate across the country. The stew is a newer treatment of an old sausage, and its spread beyond South Africa has come with the diaspora.

South Africa30 minNympha

Miyan kuka, a Northern Nigerian baobab leaf soup, dark green and thick, served with tuwon shinkafa

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.

Nigeria30 minBeatrice

Nigerian pancakes, thin savoury sweet pancakes made with onion and pepper in the batter

Nigerian Pancake (Diet)

The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and slightly crisp at the edges, and it is savoury as often as it is sweet. Onion and ground pepper go into the batter alongside the sugar, which produces something no other pancake tradition attempts: sweet, savoury and faintly hot in the same mouthful. It sits a long way from the thick fluffy pancake of the American breakfast table. There is no raising agent and no attempt at height. The batter is loose, the pan is tilted to spread it thin, and the result has a dense bite and a lacy edge. Nigerians eat it at breakfast with tea, and just as readily as an afternoon snack with a cold drink. What it is served with follows the same double logic as the batter. Honey, sugar, condensed milk, peanut butter and fresh fruit on the sweet side; pap, custard, oats and yogurt drinks such as kunu aya or zobo alongside. It is home food and street food at once, cheap to make from things most Nigerian kitchens already hold, and it belongs to no particular region of the country, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

Ogi, a Nigerian fermented corn porridge served with akara bean cakes

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Ogi is fermented cereal porridge, sour, smooth and pale, and it is among the first things most Nigerians ever eat. It is called akamu in Igbo and pap in English, and it is made from maize, sorghum or millet steeped in water for up to three days, wet milled, sieved to remove the husks, and then fermented for several more days until it turns distinctly sour. That sourness is the point and it is what separates ogi from any other cereal porridge. It also does real work: fermentation makes the grain more digestible and gives ogi a probiotic character, which is a large part of why it has been the standard weaning food for Nigerian infants for generations and why it is given to people who are unwell or recovering. The same base goes in two directions. Thinned and cooked, it is the porridge eaten at breakfast with akara, moin moin, fried plantain or bread. Cooked much thicker and left to set, it becomes agidi or eko, sliced and eaten with pepper soup or stew. Across the region the names change without the thing changing much: koko in Ghana, uji in Kenya, where it is more often made from millet and sorghum. Three grains are used in Nigeria, and white corn, yellow corn and guinea corn each give a slightly different result.

Nigeria10 minDebby

Kac kac, Somali fried sweets cut into diamonds and served with spiced milk tea

Somali Doughnuts (Kac Kac)

Kac kac, also written ka'ka, are Somali fried sweets: crisp on the outside, soft within, and cut into diamonds or squares rather than shaped into rings. They are closer to a biscuit than to a raised doughnut, because they use baking powder rather than yeast and the dough is rolled and cut rather than proved. Their setting is tea. Kac kac go with shaah caddeeys, the spiced milk tea that anchors Somali hospitality, and the pairing is fixed enough that one implies the other. They are sold in the maqaayo Soomaali, the traditional restaurants of Mogadishu and other Somali cities, where they are made in large batches in the morning and generally sold out well before the day is over. They also belong to Ramadan. A dense, sweet, portable fried thing that keeps for days is exactly what is wanted for iftar, and kac kac appear on Somali tables through the month in quantity. The marking on the surface, a light score with a knife before frying, is not decoration alone: it helps them cook through evenly and gives the piece its characteristic look. Somali communities across the diaspora have carried them intact, and they are among the first things a Somali household abroad will make for visitors.

Somalia30 minCuisine228

Klako, West African fritters of mashed ripe plantain seasoned with ginger and pepper, fried golden

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.

Côte d'Ivoire30 minCuisine228

Dominican Spaghetti

Dominican spaghetti is a Caribbean dish, not an African one, and the distinction matters on a platform documenting African food. It belongs to the Dominican Republic, where Italian migrants arriving in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought pasta into a kitchen that already had its own strong idea of what a tomato sauce should be. What resulted is recognisably Dominican rather than Italian. The base is sofrito, the sautéed onion, pepper, garlic and coriander mixture that underpins cooking across the Spanish speaking Caribbean, and the sauce carries green olives, capers and raisins alongside beef, pork or shredded chicken. That combination of briny, sweet and savoury in one sauce is a Hispanic Caribbean signature with roots reaching back through Spain to the Moorish kitchens of North Africa. That last connection is the only thread linking this dish to the continent, and it is a long and indirect one. Dominican spaghetti is presented here as what it is, a Caribbean pasta dish rather than an African one, and it sits in the Worldwide Recipes collection for that reason.

Dominican Republic30 minDebby

Nigerian Jollof Spaghetti

Jollof spaghetti applies the jollof method to pasta, and it is one of the most widely made contemporary dishes in Nigerian home kitchens. The pepper base is built exactly as it would be for rice, with blended tomato, tatashe and scotch bonnet reduced in oil with onion, ginger and garlic, and the spaghetti is finished in it so the strands take on the colour and the flavour rather than merely wearing it. Spaghetti arrived in Nigeria through mid twentieth century trade and has become one of the country's most eaten starches, particularly in urban households where it is quick and cheap. What Nigerians did with it is characteristic: rather than adopting Italian technique, they applied their own most important cooking method to it. The same has happened with jollof couscous, jollof penne and jollof noodles. It is weekday food rather than occasion food. Where jollof rice is the centrepiece of a party, jollof spaghetti is what gets made on a Tuesday, often with sausage or leftover chicken and whatever vegetables are in the house. It is served with eggs, fried plantain or chicken, and its status as a real Nigerian dish rather than a novelty is no longer in question among the people who eat it.

Nigeria30 minSobecooks

Sonhos de Banana

Sonhos de banana means banana dreams in Portuguese, and they are small fried fritters from São Tomé and Príncipe, the island nation off the coast of Central Africa. Mashed banana is worked into a batter with flour, egg, milk and sugar, dropped into hot oil and dusted with cinnamon sugar while still warm. The Portuguese connection runs through everything about them. São Tomé and Príncipe was a Portuguese colony from the late fifteenth century until 1975, and sonhos are a Portuguese sweet in their own right, a fried dough eaten particularly at Christmas. What the islands did was put banana into them, which is what the archipelago grows, and the result is closer to a beignet than to a doughnut. The same sweet, under the same name, is eaten in Brazil, which shares the Portuguese colonial inheritance from the other side of the Atlantic. That triangle of Portugal, São Tomé and Brazil is visible in a great deal of the islands' food, and sonhos de banana is one of the clearest examples. They are eaten as a dessert or simply as something sweet in the afternoon, and they are at their best within minutes of leaving the pan.

São Tomé and Príncipe30 minNympha

African salad, the Igbo dish of shredded cassava abacha with fermented ugba and palm oil

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

African salad is the Igbo dish of abacha and ugba, and it is a salad only in the loosest sense. Abacha is cassava that has been cooked, shredded on a special grater, soaked overnight, rinsed and dried in the sun. Ugba is fermented oil bean seed, cooked for hours, sliced, rinsed and left to ferment. Neither is cooked when the dish is assembled. That is the striking thing about it: almost the entire preparation happens off the stove. Palm oil is turned into a thick yellow paste by working it with potash solution, and everything else is folded into that paste in sequence. The order matters, and Igbo cooks are firm about it, because the components will not distribute evenly if they all go in together. It belongs to ceremony. At an Igbo wedding, abacha is reserved for the important guests, and it is served with chilled palm wine, which is the pairing anyone from the region will name. Despite being filling enough to be a meal, it is treated as a snack rather than a main course. It can be served cold or warmed briefly, and the choice between the two is a matter of household preference rather than correctness.

Nigeria30 minFoodChef

Fish Seasoning

This is a dry spice rub for fish, and it belongs to no particular cuisine. Paprika, thyme, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, black pepper and cayenne is a broadly Western seasoning profile, and the source claims no country for it. That is worth stating plainly on a platform documenting African food, because Africa has a great many specific fish seasonings that this is not. Nigerian fish is seasoned with blended pepper, ginger and stock cubes. Senegalese fish carries rof, a stuffing of parsley, garlic and chilli pushed into slashes in the flesh. Moroccan fish is marinated in chermoula, built on coriander, cumin, paprika and preserved lemon. Any of those would be the regional answer to the question this recipe is asking. What is here is a competent all purpose blend, useful for grilling, baking or pan frying, and it keeps for months in a sealed jar. It is filed under Worldwide Recipes rather than presented as African, since inventing a heritage for a paprika and oregano rub would be exactly the kind of claim this archive should not make.

10 minDebby

Creamy Prawns

Creamy prawns are a South African restaurant and home staple, and the country's long coastline and its Cape Malay and Portuguese-Mozambican influences are why seafood sits so comfortably in its cooking. Prawns are cooked briefly with onion and garlic, lifted out, and returned to a cream sauce reduced in the same pan. Chermoula is the ingredient that places it. It is a North African marinade, Moroccan and Algerian in origin, built on coriander, cumin, garlic, paprika and lemon, and its appearance in a South African prawn dish reflects how freely spice blends move around the continent. A seafood rub carries the rest. The contributor makes a comparison worth repeating: prawns are seen as a high-end, classy food, and they describe them as the mopane worms of the ocean. Mopane worms are the caterpillars harvested and eaten across southern Africa, nutritious, cheap and utterly unglamorous outside the region. Putting the two side by side is a fair point about how arbitrary food status is, and it is the kind of observation that belongs in the record rather than being tidied away.

South Africa25 minTshego Stone

Fried Whole Tilapia

Frying a tilapia whole is one of the most common ways it is eaten across West Africa, and it is a different proposition from cooking fillets. The skin crisps, the flesh stays moist against the bone, and the head and tail crisp up alongside, which many people consider the best part. Tilapia is a freshwater fish of shallow streams, ponds, rivers and lakes, native to Africa and now farmed on an enormous scale worldwide. That scale is why it is cheap and widely available, and it has become one of the most consumed fish in the world. It is bony, which puts some people off, and worth the small amount of care that eating it requires. The technique here is scoring and shallow frying rather than deep frying. Diagonal cuts across both sides let the spice paste reach the flesh rather than sitting on the skin, and they help the fish cook evenly through the thickest part. Turmeric, garlic, black pepper and habanero form the rub. Tilting the pan so the head and tail are submitted to the oil in turn is a small detail that matters: those parts sit above the oil line otherwise and stay soft while the middle crisps.

Nigeria30 minAnthonyJ

Merveilles

Merveilles are thin strips of fried sweet dough dusted with icing sugar, and they are sold as street food in Togo and Senegal. They are crunchy rather than soft, closer to a biscuit than a doughnut, and comparable to the fried pankere sold in Nigeria. The pastry is European in origin and travelled with colonisation. Its original name is Fasnachtschuechli in German-speaking Switzerland, and it appears in Italy as frittelle di carnevale, both carnival pastries eaten in the weeks before Lent. French speakers took the name merveilles, meaning wonders, and it is under that name that the pastry reached francophone West Africa. That it arrived from Europe does not make it any less genuinely a Togolese and Senegalese street food now. It is fried and sold locally, eaten locally, and made at home. What it is not is a dish with African origins, and the About says so rather than implying otherwise. Nutmeg in the dough is a small local touch. The source's method calls for yeast, which does not appear in its ingredient list, and no rise time is given, so the dough as written is unleavened.

Togo30 minAnthonyJ

Air Fryer Baby Potatoes

Baby potatoes tossed in olive oil, garlic powder and paprika and cooked in an air fryer until crisp outside and soft inside. There is no country attached to this and none is implied: it is a modern appliance recipe of the kind that exists in every cuisine that has adopted the air fryer. It sits in Worldwide Recipes for that reason. Nothing about the seasoning, the technique or the ingredients points to any tradition. Paprika, garlic powder and rosemary is a broadly Western profile, and the air fryer itself is a domestic appliance of the last fifteen years. African potato dishes exist and are quite different. Chtitha batata is the Algerian potato stew built on dersa, a garlic and chilli paste. Maakouda is the Moroccan fried potato cake. Irio is the Kenyan potato, pea and corn mash. Each has a name and a place. This is a good side dish and it is honestly labelled as what it is. One practical note: the source states a cook time of ten minutes and its own method says twenty to twenty-five, which is what the timing here follows.

30 minDebby

Fried Plantain

Fried plantain is thick slices of ripe plantain, lightly salted and fried until the edges caramelise, and it is eaten wherever plantain grows. Across West Africa, East Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America and Southeast Asia, the same three ingredients produce essentially the same thing. Its names change with the border. In Nigeria it is dodo. In Côte d'Ivoire it is alloco. In Ghana the spiced version is kelewele, marinated in ginger and chilli before frying, which makes it a different dish rather than a different name. Those distinctions matter and are often blurred. Plantains are not bananas, though they look alike. They are starchier, they are cooked rather than eaten raw, and they can be used at any stage of ripeness for completely different results: green for chips and savoury dishes, ripe for this. What ripe plantain gives is the caramel-brown crust and the soft, sweet interior that the source describes as savoury-sweet, and it comes from the sugars that develop as the fruit blackens. No country is claimed here because the dish belongs to all of them.

Nigeria20 minBeatrice

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 minDebby

Air Fryer Bananas

Ripe bananas sliced, optionally dusted with cinnamon, and cooked in an air fryer until the outsides colour and the insides go soft. It is a modern appliance recipe with no country attached and none implied, and it sits in Worldwide Recipes with its URL unchanged. It is a good use for bananas that have gone too soft to eat, which is the honest appeal of it. Air frying uses very little oil and the sugars in an overripe banana caramelise readily, so the result colours quickly without any added fat at all. Africa's fried banana and plantain traditions are quite different, and worth naming since the confusion is easy. Plantain is not banana: it is starchier, larger and cooked rather than eaten raw, and fried ripe plantain appears across the continent as dodo in Nigeria, alloco in Côte d'Ivoire and kelewele in Ghana, where it is spiced first. Rwandan banana beignets and Cameroonian banana fritters use actual bananas but in a batter. None of them is this, which is a plain appliance treatment of sliced fruit.

15 minDebby

Chicken Seasoning

A dry rub for chicken: thyme, cayenne, cumin, paprika, garlic powder, black pepper, oregano, onion powder and salt. It carries no country and it is a broadly Western blend, the direct counterpart to the fish seasoning already in this collection. That is worth saying plainly on a platform documenting African food, because Africa has a great many chicken seasonings that this is not. Nigerian suya spice, yaji, is built on ground peanuts with paprika, cayenne and ginger. Ethiopian berbere combines chilli with cardamom, fenugreek and rue. Moroccan ras el hanout can run to a dozen or more spices. Peri peri from Mozambique and Angola leads with African bird's eye chilli and lemon. Any of those would be the regional answer. What is here is a competent all-purpose rub, useful for roasting, grilling or frying, and it keeps for months in a sealed jar. It is filed under Worldwide Recipes rather than presented as African. One practical note the source makes and is right about: the salt is adjustable and can be left out entirely, which is worth doing if you are also using a seasoning cube or a brine, since both already carry a great deal.

5 minDebby

Instant Pot Cabbage

Cabbage sautéed and then pressure cooked briefly with broth, finished with apple cider vinegar. It is an appliance recipe with no country attached, and it sits in Worldwide Recipes with its URL unchanged. What the pressure cooker does is worth understanding. Cabbage has tough cell walls, and the pressurised environment breaks them down far faster than boiling, braising or roasting: three minutes under pressure against the hour or more those methods take. That speed is the entire appeal, and it also means the margin between tender and collapsed is narrow. The apple cider vinegar at the end is doing real work. Cabbage turns sweet as it cooks and a splash of acid at the finish cuts through that and sharpens the whole dish, which is why it goes in after cooking rather than before. Africa's own cabbage dishes are quite different and are worth naming: South African chakalaka combines it with carrot, beans and curry spice; East African cabbage is fried with onion, tomato and carrot alongside ugali; Ethiopian tikil gomen cooks it slowly with potato, carrot and turmeric. None of them is this.

25 minDebby

Spiced Chicken Curry Sauce

Chicken and a great many vegetables cooked down with curry powder, sazon and scotch bonnet, then thickened with a cornflour slurry. The source calls it South Asian; the ingredients say otherwise, and it is worth being straight about which. A genuine South Asian curry is built on whole spices bloomed in fat, on ginger and garlic paste, and on onions cooked down at length. This one uses curry powder, all-purpose seasoning, bouillon cubes and blended scotch bonnet, the standard vocabulary of West African and Caribbean home cooking, plus sazon, which is a Puerto Rican seasoning blend now sold everywhere. Sesame oil is the one genuinely East Asian note. What that amounts to is a diaspora dish that borrows the word curry rather than the tradition, and it is more interesting described accurately than mislabelled. The cabbage, carrots and three colours of bell pepper are not a South Asian habit either. They are what makes this closer to a Nigerian or Ghanaian fried pepper sauce, the kind ladled over rice on a weeknight. No country is claimed for it, and the flags note that its own description contradicts its ingredients. The source's closing line is garbled, it promises the streets of somewhere and then names no city, so it has not been carried across.

30 minSobecooks

Turkey bacon cooked crisp in an air fryer

Air Fryer Turkey Bacon

Turkey bacon strips cooked in an air fryer until crisp. No country is claimed; turkey bacon is an American product. It behaves differently from pork bacon and the difference explains the method. Pork bacon renders a great deal of fat as it cooks, and that fat is what fries the meat, it is essentially cooking itself. Turkey bacon has far less fat, so it dries out rather than frying, and in a pan it tends to stick and to go from limp to leathery without passing through crisp. Circulating hot air handles it better: it dehydrates the surface evenly and crisps it without needing rendered fat to do the work. That also means it needs watching. Six to eight minutes is the window in most machines, and the source is right that timing varies with thickness and with the machine. A minute too long and it is brittle. Whether it is a healthier choice is a more complicated question than the source allows. Turkey bacon is lower in fat and calories than pork bacon, but it is comparably high in sodium and is still a processed meat. The claim has been left out. Turkey is not African and neither is bacon in this form. Africa has its own cured and smoked meats, biltong, kilishi, dambu nama, all on this site.

15 minDebby

Cheese Omelette

Beaten eggs cooked in butter with grated cheese. No country is claimed, the omelette is French in origin and universal now. The source's explanation of the French and American styles is accurate and worth keeping. A French omelette is cooked fast over higher heat with constant agitation, then rolled into a log while the centre is still soft, and it is pale yellow with no browning at all. An American omelet is cooked more gently, the set edges lifted so uncooked egg runs underneath, and it is folded in half. Both start with the same beaten eggs; the technique is what separates them. The one piece of practical advice worth repeating is about the filling. Cheese for an omelette should be grated finely and used sparingly, because a heavy filling stops the egg sealing around it and the omelette tears when you fold or roll it. This page needs a caveat. The source's own recipe is neither of the styles it describes: it separates the eggs, whips the whites stiff, folds them back in with breadcrumbs, and finishes the top in the oven. That is a soufflé omelette, an old and perfectly good preparation but a different dish from the one the article explains. The method below follows what is written, and the discrepancy is flagged. The source also gives no quantities.

15 minBeatrice

Chips mayai, Tanzanian chips cooked into an omelette, served with kachumbari

Chips Mayai (Tanzanian Chip Omelette)

Chips mayai is chips set into an omelette and cooked as a single flat cake. The name is literal, chipsi is chips, mayai is eggs in Swahili, and it is one of the defining Tanzanian street foods, also known as zege. It is sold from stalls across the country and cooked to order: fries already made, eggs beaten with chopped onion, tomato, green pepper and coriander, the two combined in a hot pan and turned once. Minced meat goes in where a heartier version is wanted. It arrives with kachumbari, the East African tomato and onion salad, and tomato sauce. The comparison the source draws with Spanish tortilla is apt and worth thinking about, because the difference is instructive. A tortilla española uses potato sliced thin and cooked gently in oil until soft, folded into egg and set slowly into something dense and custardy. Chips mayai uses chips, already fried, already crisp, and cooks fast, so the potato keeps some of its structure and the egg stays lighter. Same two ingredients, entirely different results, and the potato cut is what does it. It is eaten at any hour: breakfast, a late-night meal after drinking, or a snack in between. Nothing about it is formal.

Tanzania30 minBlessing

Farofa, Brazilian toasted cassava flour with bacon and onion

Farofa (Toasted Cassava Flour)

Farofa is cassava flour toasted in fat with onion, garlic and usually bacon, until it turns golden and sandy. It is Brazilian, and it appears on the table at almost every Brazilian meal that involves a stew or grilled meat. Its job is texture. Brazilian cooking produces a great deal of rich, soupy food, feijoada above all, and farofa is scattered over it to absorb the liquid and give a dry, crunchy contrast. Eaten on its own it makes little sense; eaten over a wet dish it makes complete sense, and that is how it is used. The African connection is direct and worth stating. Cassava is South American in origin, but the technique of toasting cassava meal into a dry accompaniment moved across the Atlantic in both directions with the transatlantic slave trade, and farofa's closest relatives are West African. Garri, the fermented and toasted cassava granules eaten across Nigeria, Ghana and Benin, is made by essentially the same process. Brazilian cooking, and Bahian cooking in particular, carries an enormous amount of West African influence, and farofa sits squarely in that history, which is precisely why it belongs in a Worldwide collection on an African food site rather than being simply foreign. The method is short and the one instruction that matters is to keep it moving. Cassava flour burns quickly and unevenly.

15 minNympha

Homemade Chilli Garlic Oil

Hot oil poured over garlic and dried chilli, then strained. It is a condiment rather than a dish, and it belongs to East and Southeast Asian cooking, where versions of it are a kitchen staple. The technique is the whole thing, and it hinges on a short window. Oil is heated until shimmering, taken off the heat, and the garlic goes in for ten to thirty seconds only. The residual heat is enough to draw the flavour out; any longer and the garlic burns, which happens fast and produces a bitterness that cannot be removed. Chilli flakes go in after, because they scorch even more readily. Straining is the source's choice and it is a legitimate one, but it is worth knowing it is not the only approach. Chinese chilli crisp and many Southeast Asian versions deliberately keep the solids in, so you get texture as well as flavour. Straining gives you a clear, clean infused oil; leaving it gives you something to spoon over food. Both keep. The flavour improves for a day or two as the oil continues to take on the garlic and chilli, so making it ahead is worthwhile. It has a real African cousin worth mentioning. Ghanaian shito, the dark fried pepper sauce, works on the same principle of chilli cooked into oil, and it has its own recipe on this site.

10 minDebby

Shrimp and Egg Stir-Fry

Shrimp cooked briefly in hot oil and folded through softly scrambled egg. It is Cantonese, and it sits in Worldwide Recipes with its URL unchanged. The Chinese name explains the whole dish. Huá dàn xiā rén, 滑蛋虾仁, contains the word huá, meaning slippery or smooth, and that texture is the point: the egg is meant to be soft, silky and barely set, not dry and crumbly. Everything in the method exists to achieve it. Two details do the work. The eggs must be at room temperature, which the source flags as very important and is right about, cold eggs hitting a hot wok seize and set into firm curds instead of staying soft. And the egg goes in last, over the cooked shrimp, and is folded rather than stirred, coming off the heat while it still looks slightly underdone. The shrimp needs almost no time at all. They are done the moment they turn pink and curl, which is a matter of a minute or so, and shrimp cooked past that point go rubbery. Sesame oil goes into the beaten egg rather than the pan, which is unusual and deliberate, it seasons from within rather than burning off. It is a good example of what the source calls less is more.

20 minCuisine228

Recettes

Merveilles

Fried Whole Tilapia

Creamy Prawns

Fish Seasoning

Air Fryer Turkey Bacon

Spiced Chicken Curry Sauce

Instant Pot Cabbage

Chicken Seasoning

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Sonhos de Banana

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Boerewors Stew

Miyan Kuka (Baobab Leaves Soup)

Nigerian Pancake (Diet)

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Somali Doughnuts (Kac Kac)

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Dominican Spaghetti

Nigerian Jollof Spaghetti

Sonhos de Banana

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Fish Seasoning

Creamy Prawns

Fried Whole Tilapia

Merveilles

Air Fryer Baby Potatoes

Fried Plantain

Quick Egg Stew

Air Fryer Bananas

Chicken Seasoning

Instant Pot Cabbage

Spiced Chicken Curry Sauce

Air Fryer Turkey Bacon

Cheese Omelette

Chips Mayai (Tanzanian Chip Omelette)

Farofa (Toasted Cassava Flour)

Homemade Chilli Garlic Oil

Shrimp and Egg Stir-Fry

Recettes

Recettes à la une

Merveilles

Air Fryer Turkey Bacon

Spiced Chicken Curry Sauce

Instant Pot Cabbage

Chicken Seasoning

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Sonhos de Banana

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Boerewors Stew

Miyan Kuka (Baobab Leaves Soup)

Nigerian Pancake (Diet)

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Somali Doughnuts (Kac Kac)

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Dominican Spaghetti

Nigerian Jollof Spaghetti

Sonhos de Banana

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Fish Seasoning

Creamy Prawns

Fried Whole Tilapia

Merveilles

Air Fryer Baby Potatoes

Fried Plantain

Quick Egg Stew

Air Fryer Bananas

Chicken Seasoning

Instant Pot Cabbage

Spiced Chicken Curry Sauce

Air Fryer Turkey Bacon

Cheese Omelette

Chips Mayai (Tanzanian Chip Omelette)

Farofa (Toasted Cassava Flour)

Homemade Chilli Garlic Oil

Shrimp and Egg Stir-Fry