Recettes

Chicken Curry Sauce

This is a Nigerian take on a curry sauce: chicken breast marinated in ginger, garlic and all purpose seasoning, cooked with carrots and bell peppers, and thickened with a cornstarch slurry rather than reduced or enriched with cream. Two things mark it as Nigerian rather than South Asian. The first is yaji, the suya spice built on ground peanuts, paprika, cayenne, ginger and garlic, which goes in alongside the curry powder and gives an aromatic depth no Indian curry would have. The second is the cornstarch slurry, which is how a great many Nigerian sauces are thickened, giving a glossy sauce that clings rather than a reduced one. The vegetables are meant to keep their bite. Carrots and bell peppers go in after the onion and are cooked only until slightly tender, which is characteristic of Nigerian party cooking, where texture and colour matter as much as flavour. The heat is moderate and adjustable through the scotch bonnet. Because yaji contains ground peanuts, this dish carries a peanut allergen despite nothing in its name suggesting one.

50 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook

Picnic Bread (From South Africa)

Picnic bread is a South African savoury quick bread, heavy with cheese, spring onion and bacon, bound with egg, and made to be eaten cold in a slice with nothing on it. The category matters. It is a quick bread, raised chemically rather than with yeast, which means no proving and no kneading. Everything is mixed and baked. That is much of why it exists: it is a bread that can be made in an evening for the next day without planning. Its association is with food carried away from home. It is described as an old recipe favoured by fishermen for their packed lunches and by schoolchildren, and the reasoning is visible in the recipe itself. It needs no butter because there is enough fat in it already. It holds together in a slice rather than crumbling. It does not dry out the way a plain loaf does. And it is dense enough that one slice is a meal rather than an accompaniment, which is exactly what you want on a boat or a long day out. The texture is unusual for a bread. It is moist, almost pudding-like in the middle, without being heavy, and the cheese keeps it soft for days. It is honest about what it is: nobody has ever pretended this is a low-fat recipe.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

55 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

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 minEasy

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Grilled Tilapia with Lemon, Garlic and Ginger

Whole tilapia scored, marinated in an oil-based spice mixture, oven-grilled, then coated in a fresh green pepper base and returned to the heat. The two-stage seasoning is what makes it, and it is a West African approach rather than a simple marinade. The first stage is a dry-spice oil: vegetable oil with fish seasoning, white and black pepper, ginger, garlic, onion powder and lemon juice, worked into the cuts. The second is a green pepper base built in a food processor from green and red scotch bonnets, bell peppers, spinach, dill, coriander, ginger, garlic and onion, fried briefly in oil and then smeared over the part-cooked fish. That green base is the interesting part. Blending leafy greens and fresh herbs into a pepper sauce is characteristic of Ghanaian and wider West African fish cookery, and it gives colour and a fresh, sharp finish that a marinade applied only at the start cannot. The scoring is not decorative either: two or three cuts on each side let both stages of seasoning reach the flesh rather than sitting on the skin. Tilapia is native to African fresh waters and is the fish most associated with Ghanaian grilling, usually eaten with banku.

50 minMediumGhana · African

Recette de Rashidatu Alhassan · Africook