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Recettes
Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.
Corn grilled in its husk, buttered and salted, is street food across a great deal of Africa. It is sold from braziers and roadside grills in Nigeria as agbado, in Ghana, in Kenya as mahindi choma, and across the continent wherever maize grows, which is nearly everywhere.
Maize is not indigenous to Africa. It came from the Americas through Portuguese trade in the sixteenth century and became one of the continent's dominant staples within a few hundred years, ground into the flours behind ugali, sadza, pap, banku and kenkey. Grilled on the cob it is the simplest thing done with it.
The technique here differs from the street version in one respect worth knowing. Roadside corn across Africa is grilled directly over coals, husk removed, so the kernels char and blister, and it is usually sold with a piece of raw coconut alongside. This recipe keeps the husk on, butters underneath it and pulls it back up, which steams the corn as much as it grills it and gives a softer, more evenly cooked result with no char. Both are good; they are different things. Dry husks are soaked briefly first so they do not burn through.
Suya toast is a sandwich: beef or chicken suya between slices of bread, dusted with suya spice, and grilled under a broiler until the outside crisps. It is a contemporary Nigerian invention rather than a traditional dish, and it exists because suya is so good that people put it in things.
Suya itself is the tradition here. It is skewered grilled meat coated in yaji, the spice blend built on ground peanuts, paprika, cayenne, ginger, garlic and onion powder, and it is sold from roadside grills across northern Nigeria and now the whole country. The mallam who grills it works over an open fire and the spice is applied before and after cooking.
Putting that into a toasted sandwich with mayonnaise, tomato and cucumber is a diaspora and urban move, and it works on the same logic as any good sandwich: something rich, something sharp, something crunchy. The suya spice does the heavy lifting. Because yaji contains ground peanuts, this carries a peanut allergen even though the sandwich itself looks nothing like a peanut dish, and that is worth stating plainly.
Oyster mushrooms grilled and tossed in suya spice. It is a plant-based version of the Nigerian street food, and it works better than most meat substitutions do.
**The traditional suya spice contains ground peanuts, and this recipe includes them.** The source flags it and offers to leave them out, which is honest, but it is worth stating clearly, because a peanut allergy and a suya spice blend are a genuinely dangerous combination and the name gives no warning.
Suya proper is skewered beef, ram or chicken rubbed in yaji, the spice blend of ground roasted peanuts, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion powder and paprika, and grilled over open coals. It is Hausa in origin, from northern Nigeria, and it is sold across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Ghana and parts of Sudan. Kyinkyinga is the Ghanaian name, agashe the Sudanese.
Oyster mushrooms are the right substitution and not an arbitrary one. Shredded, they have a fibrous, layered structure that genuinely resembles pulled meat, they take on the dry rub readily, and they char well. Most vegetables do neither.
The source's method is very compressed, one step reads "put in a preheated medium", with the word oven missing, and has been filled out below.
A fricassé is a small oval roll of enriched dough, deep-fried and then split and packed with tuna, potato, olives, egg and harissa. It is Tunisian street food, and it is one of the country's most recognisable things to eat.
The word does not mean what it means elsewhere. In French, a fricassée is a braise of meat in a white sauce; in Tunisia and its diaspora it means this sandwich and nothing else. That divergence is complete enough that searching the French term will not find you the Tunisian food.
The filling is the point and it is fixed by convention rather than by recipe: tuna in olive oil, cooked potato, black olives, egg and harissa, with slata méchouia, the grilled pepper and tomato salad, very often alongside. Capers and preserved lemon appear in some versions. What matters is that the bread is fried rather than baked, which gives a rich, slightly greasy roll that stands up to a wet filling.
**A significant gap in the source.** Its ingredient list contains only the dough, yeast, water, flour, egg, oil, salt. Not one of the filling ingredients it spends its article describing appears in it. The filling below has been reconstructed from that description and flagged.
**It contains eggs and fish.**