Recettes

Moi Moi / Moin Moin

Moi moi is steamed bean pudding, and it is among the small group of Nigerian dishes that turn up everywhere: at breakfast, at parties, at weddings, in lunchboxes, beside jollof rice, and on its own. Black eyed peas or brown beans are soaked, peeled, blended with pepper and onion, seasoned, and steamed until they set. The peeling is what most people underestimate. The bean skins have to come off before blending, because they are what stands between a smooth moi moi and a gritty one, and the quality of the blend decides the texture of the finished dish more than any other single factor. Nigerian markets have heavy duty commercial mills for exactly this reason, and home blenders often cannot manage it. What it is steamed in changes the result and the name. Uma leaves, from Thaumatococcus daniellii, give the best flavour and cook fastest; banana leaves are the common alternative; aluminium foil and heatproof containers are the modern route. Nutmeg is the ingredient people leave out and then wonder why their moi moi does not taste like the one at the party. Egg, corned beef or bone marrow goes into the middle, and moi moi appears as a side to jollof and fried rice, as breakfast with pap or bread, and as a meal in itself.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 30 minMediumNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Waakye

Waakye is rice and beans cooked together with dried millet or sorghum stalk leaves, which leach a deep reddish brown into the grain and give the dish both its colour and its name. It is Ghana's most loved street breakfast, and in Accra and Kumasi the waakye seller is a neighbourhood institution whose location is known, whose quality is debated and whose loyalty is genuinely held. Sellers begin before dawn and often sell out by mid morning. The dish is bought wrapped in leaves and assembled to the customer's specification from a wide spread of accompaniments: shito, the dark Ghanaian pepper and fish sauce, gari, egg, spaghetti known as talia, fried plantain, avocado, salad, stew and fried fish or meat. A full waakye plate is substantial enough to carry someone through a working day, which is precisely what it is for. The waakye leaf is the ingredient that cannot be substituted. It is the dried leaf sheath of a West African sorghum, called poporo oka in Yoruba and adako in Togo, and it functions as a colourant rather than a flavouring, with the quantity used determining how deep the colour runs. Black eyed beans are traditional and jasmine rice is the Ghanaian preference. The dish is eaten across West Africa under other names, as wanke in Lagos and ayimolou in Togo.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 15 minEasyGhana

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

10 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Debby · Africook

Egg Sauce

Egg sauce is a Nigerian breakfast staple: eggs cooked into a base of tomato, onion and scotch bonnet until scrambled through it. It is what plain yam is most often eaten with, and it is one of the fastest hot meals in the Nigerian repertoire. What separates it from an omelette or from scrambled eggs is that the tomato base comes first. Onion and pepper are softened, tomatoes cooked down until they release their juices and soften, the seasoning goes in, and only then do the beaten eggs. The eggs are stirred through so the whole thing becomes one sauce rather than eggs with sauce on top. Two ingredients in this version are worth noticing. Sesame oil in place of vegetable oil is unusual in a Nigerian kitchen and gives a distinctly nutty background, and curry powder alongside is a Nigerian habit rather than an Indian one. Both are the contributor's choices rather than the standard. Egg sauce is genuinely close to what is elsewhere called egg stew, and the two names are used for much the same dish across Nigeria and Ghana, with the difference usually being consistency rather than method.

25 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook