Recettes

Crispy fried chicken feet, deep fried to golden brown and served as a snack

How to Make Crispy Fried Chicken Feet

Chicken feet carry almost no meat. What they carry is skin, tendon and collagen, and that is precisely the reason they are eaten: cooked properly they deliver a texture that no other part of the bird provides, gelatinous underneath and crisp on the surface. They belong to the category of cuts that are eaten wherever nothing is wasted, which covers a large share of the world. Across West and Southern Africa, in the Caribbean, across East and Southeast Asia, chicken feet are street food and bar food, cheap, communal, and eaten with the hands. In much of the global north they are treated as waste and rendered for stock, which is a recent and geographically narrow position rather than a normal one. Eating them has its own protocol. The foot is held in the fingers, and the toes are bitten off one at a time between the joints, with the bones and nails discarded. That is not fussiness; it is the only way to get at what is edible. The result is food that takes time to eat and is therefore sociable, which is most of what a bar snack is for.

35 minDebby

Homemade Chicken Mayo Pies

The chicken mayo pie is a hand pie: a short, buttery pastry case around a filling of shredded chicken bound with mayonnaise and softened onion and pepper, baked until the top browns. It is designed to be eaten standing up, out of a paper bag, without a plate or cutlery. Handheld savoury pies occupy a particular position in Southern African food culture, where they are sold from bakeries, supermarket warmers and roadside outlets and eaten as a fast, complete portable meal. The chicken and mayonnaise filling is one of the most common versions in that category, alongside steak and kidney, chicken and mushroom, and mince. The dish's lineage is European rather than African. The short crust hand pie came with British and Dutch settlement across Southern and East Africa and was absorbed into the local eating economy so thoroughly that its origins are no longer visible in how it is eaten. What is African about it is that absorption: a pie bought at a garage forecourt on the way to work is a normal part of the day across several countries on the continent, and the mayonnaise binding is a local preference rather than a British one.

1 hriam.nkay

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.

2 hrLaila

Kafteji

Kafteji is Tunisian street food built on a single idea: fry a range of vegetables separately so each one is properly cooked, then chop them together and serve the result with bread. Potato, courgette, pepper, tomato and aubergine are the usual cast, and the chopping at the end is what makes it kafteji rather than a plate of fried vegetables. It is sold from small counters and casse-croûte shops across Tunisia and eaten at any hour, most often stuffed into bread as a sandwich. It is inexpensive, which is part of its identity: kafteji is what you eat when you want something substantial and hot without a restaurant. Fried egg is a common addition, and in many Tunisian versions it is the only protein. The version here includes ground beef or lamb, which puts it at one end of a range. Kafteji is frequently made entirely without meat, and the vegetable only preparation is at least as common in Tunisia as the meat version. Harissa, olives and a squeeze of lemon are the usual finishing touches, and the dish is eaten from a shared plate with bread as the utensil.

Tunisia50 minLaila

Kenkey

Kenkey is fermented maize dough, wrapped in banana leaf or corn husk and steamed into firm parcels. It is sour, and the sourness is the whole character of it. The fermentation runs one to three days before anything is cooked, and a kenkey that has been rushed is immediately identifiable to anyone who eats it regularly. It comes from the Ga people of Accra and the surrounding coast, who have been making it for centuries, and it has spread across Ghana without losing that origin. Ga kenkey and Fante kenkey are recognised as distinct: the wrapping differs, and so does the ratio of fermented to fresh dough, which changes how sour the finished parcel is. Kenkey is street food in the most functional sense. It is bought in its wrapping, which serves as the plate, and eaten with fried fish, shito and a raw pepper and tomato grind, standing up or sitting on a bench. The wrapping is not presentation; it is what the dough is steamed in and what keeps it for days without refrigeration. That combination of sour dough, hot pepper and fried fish is one of the most recognisable plates in West Africa.

Ghana55 minLaila

Awara, a Northern Nigerian fried soy bean cake, served hot with pepper and sliced vegetables

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Awara is Northern Nigerian soy bean cake, and it is one of the clearest examples of an introduced crop becoming a genuinely local food. Soy beans are not indigenous to West Africa. Awara, as the Hausa make and eat it, is not found anywhere the crop came from. What separates awara from tofu is the frying. The process to the curd stage is the same: beans are soaked, ground, strained to a milk, heated, and set with an acid or a mineral coagulant, then pressed. Where East Asian tofu is usually finished at the press, awara is cut, seasoned and fried until the outside is golden and firm. That frying step is the dish, and it produces something with a texture and a flavour of its own. It is street food and snack food, sold ready made across the north because the process at home is long. Awara is served hot with ground pepper and oil, and increasingly with sliced fresh pepper, cabbage and cucumber alongside. It is eaten with pap or kunu at breakfast, and at any hour after that. It is also the north's most practical answer for anyone eating no meat, which is a role it has held far longer than the word vegetarian has been in common use in Nigeria.

Nigeria1 hr 30 minJennifer

Agege Bread

Agege bread is named for a suburb of Lagos, and the naming is the whole story: a bread so associated with one district that the district's name became the product. It is soft, pillowy, slightly sweet, and it pulls apart in strands rather than tearing cleanly, which is the texture Lagosians recognise before they taste anything. It is street food infrastructure. Agege bread is sold from bread hawkers' trays and roadside stands across Lagos and far beyond it, and its most characteristic use is the simplest one: torn and dipped into stew, particularly the pepper stews sold at the same roadside. It is also split around fried egg, sardines, butter or beans, and eaten walking. The bread has become a piece of Lagos shorthand, standing in for a whole way of eating in the city, and for many Nigerians abroad it is the specific bread they mean when they say they miss bread from home. That reputation has produced a persistent confusion with Jamaican hardo bread, which it resembles in shape and softness. Agege bread is Nigerian, from Lagos, and named for the place that made it.

Nigeria2 hr 20 minDebby

Rwandan brochettes, goat meat skewers grilled over charcoal and served with plantain and salad

Rwandan Brochettes (Grilled Meat Skewers)

Brochettes are skewered grilled meat, and in Rwanda they are the food most reliably present wherever people gather in the evening. Goat is the usual choice, threaded onto skewers with onion, grilled over charcoal, and eaten standing at a bar, sitting in a restaurant, or bought from a street vendor on the way somewhere else. The word is French, meaning skewer, and its presence in Rwandan usage is a plain marker of the colonial period. What the word describes is entirely Rwandan: a particular cut, a particular char, and a particular way of eating, with grilled or fried plantain, potatoes and a fresh salad alongside. They are not heavily spiced, which distinguishes them sharply from the grilled meat traditions further west. Where Nigerian suya is built on a dry spice coating and West African peppered goat is aggressively hot, a Rwandan brochette is seasoned simply and relies on the meat and the fire. Heat, when it is wanted, arrives separately at the table as akabanga, the thin orange Rwandan chilli oil that is sold in small bottles and used a drop at a time. That separation of meat and heat is a matter of preference in Rwanda rather than an absence of one.

Rwanda55 minDebby

Buka stew, a Nigerian pepper stew with assorted meats cooked in bleached palm oil

Buka Stew With Assorted Meats (Obe Ata)

Buka stew is the pepper stew of western Nigeria, named for the places that made it famous. A buka is a small, cheap local eating house, and the buka is where working Lagos eats: fresh food, several dishes, no cooking at home, and no pretensions about any of it. The stew belongs to those kitchens and carries their signature. It is a pepper stew rather than a tomato stew, and the distinction is the whole recipe: tatashe and rodo dominate and tomato is kept back, which is the reverse of the everyday Nigerian stew ratio. The palm oil is bleached first, heated until it changes character, and that step produces the specific aroma that makes a buka identifiable from the street. Seasoning is kept minimal on purpose, because the peppers and the oil are doing the work. It is made with assorted meats, the cow parts that a household kitchen might skip and a buka never does, deep fried before they go into the pot. The women who run these kitchens are known collectively in Nigerian speech as Iya Basira, a name that stands in for all of them, and mama put is what the roadside version is called. Buka stew is eaten with white rice, beans, yam, fried plantain or agege bread.

Nigeria50 minJennifer

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

A South African kota, a quarter loaf of bread filled with chips, russian sausage, cheese and atchar

Classic South African Kota

A kota is a quarter loaf of bread, hollowed out and packed with fried food. The word is township English for quarter, and that is the whole description: bread cut in four, the soft centre pulled out, and the cavity filled with chips, polony, russians, viennas, cheese, egg, atchar and sauce, then capped with the bread that was removed. It belongs to the townships of Gauteng, where it is sold from small takeaway windows and eaten in the hand without a plate. Kota shops compete on what they will fit into a quarter loaf, and the size of the fill is a large part of the reputation. It is cheap, it is a complete meal, and it is built for people who need to eat between one thing and the next. Atchar is what makes it South African rather than generically stuffed bread. The pickled green mango relish, oily and sour and hot, came to South Africa through Indian indenture and cuts the fried starch that dominates everything else in the cavity. Kota is often described as a version of bunny chow, and the two are related without being the same: bunny chow is Durban Indian, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, and kota is a Gauteng township form filled with fried items. They share an ancestor and are not interchangeable.

South Africa40 minTshego Stone

Gullisuwa

Gullisuwa is a Hausa fried pastry from Northern Nigeria, made from wheat flour worked with ground roasted peanuts and fried until crisp. The groundnuts are what distinguish it. They give the pastry a toasted, faintly sweet base that a plain flour dough does not have, and groundnuts are one of the defining crops of the northern Nigerian savannah. It belongs to celebration rather than to the everyday. Gullisuwa appears at weddings, at festive occasions and as street food, made in quantity because it keeps well and travels well, and it is offered to guests as part of the spread rather than served as a course. That is the usual position of a fried snack in Hausa hospitality: present, plentiful and not the point of the meal. Its exact origin is not documented. What can be said is that it belongs to the Hausa, that it has been made for generations, and that Northern Nigeria's long trade and cultural connection with the Sahara and the Arab world is visible in a good deal of its sweet and fried food. Beyond that, the specific lineage of gullisuwa is not recorded, and the honest position is to say so rather than to construct one.

Nigeria50 minLaila

Puff-Puff

Puff puff is deep fried yeast dough, golden outside and chewy within, and it is the most widely eaten street snack in West Africa. Flour, sugar, yeast, water and salt are all it requires, which is a large part of why it is everywhere: the ingredients are in every kitchen and the technique needs no equipment. The names change with the border. Puff puff in Nigeria and Cameroon, bofrot or togbei in Ghana, and further variations across the region, but the dough and the method travel intact. It is sold from roadside stands in the evening, made at home for parties and children, and eaten hot from the oil with the fingers. What distinguishes it from a doughnut is the chew. Puff puff dough is a loose batter rather than a kneaded dough, scooped by hand and squeezed into the oil rather than shaped, and the long rise gives it a slightly fermented depth that a quick doughnut does not have. Variations run through the same base: habanero chopped into the batter for a peppered version, milk for a softer and sweeter one, nutmeg or cinnamon for warmth. It is late night food as much as party food, which is how most people who grew up with it remember it.

Nigeria2 hr 20 minBeatrice

Djablani

Djablani is a Malian drink of ginger, lemon and baobab, served cold and sharply flavoured. It belongs to the family of fresh homemade drinks sold in bags and bottles across West Africa, alongside bissap made from hibiscus and dakar made from tamarind, prepared in quantity in households and sold by the roadside. The baobab is what places it. The tree grows across the Sahel and is one of the defining plants of the Malian landscape, distinctive in shape, able to survive extreme heat and poor soil, and long lived on a scale that has made it a landmark in its own right. Its fruit gives a pale tart pulp used in drinks and porridges across the region, and its leaves are dried and ground for soup. Ginger carries the rest. West African ginger drinks are made strong, and the heat in a properly made djablani is genuine rather than suggested, which is what the sugar and the lemon are there to balance. It is served cold, often with mint, and it is refreshment in a climate where that word means something specific. Fresh drinks of this kind are a category of their own in West African hospitality: made at home, given to guests, and sold cheaply on the street.

Mali15 minDeborah

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.

Nigeria35 minBeatrice

Ugandan rolex, an omelette with vegetables rolled inside a chapati and sliced

Ugandan Rolex Chapati

The rolex has nothing to do with watches. The name compresses rolled eggs into one word, and that is exactly what it is: an omelette with vegetables rolled inside a chapati, made to order at a roadside stand and handed over in paper. It is the street food of Kampala and now of the whole country. Vendors work from small stalls with a hot plate and a stack of chapatis, and the whole transaction takes a couple of minutes. Its rise is generally placed in Kampala among university students, who wanted something filling and cheap, and it spread from there across Uganda and into the country's international reputation. The chapati underneath it is itself a piece of history. Flatbread of this kind came to East Africa with Indian migration, particularly the labourers and traders who arrived under British colonial administration, and it has been fully absorbed into Ugandan and Kenyan eating. What Uganda did was wrap an omelette in it. That is a small innovation and it produced a national dish, which is roughly how street food has always worked: someone puts two cheap things together and the city decides it is right.

Uganda40 minDebby

Groundnut Sweet

Groundnut sweet is peanuts set in caramelised sugar and cut into blocks, and it is made from three things: groundnuts, sugar and water. In Cameroon it is sold by the piece from roadside tables and market stalls, cut from a slab with a knife, and it is among the cheapest sweet things available anywhere in the country. Groundnuts are grown across Cameroon and across the West African savannah generally, and the confection follows the crop. Similar sweets exist wherever groundnuts are abundant and sugar is affordable, which covers a great deal of the continent and much of the world beyond it, and each region has arrived at its own version independently. What makes it work is the contrast in texture rather than any complexity of flavour. The sugar sets to a hard, glassy shell around nuts that stay crisp inside it, so a piece shatters rather than chews. It is the kind of sweet that gets eaten by the handful without anyone deciding to, and it is made in slabs precisely because it is sold and eaten in that way: broken off, handed round, gone.

CameroonNympha

Wasawasa

Wasawasa is made from yam peelings. Not yam, but the skin that most kitchens discard: dried, ground into flour, and steamed into a coarse grain that eats something like couscous. It is a dish that exists because nothing was wasted, and it has outlived the scarcity that produced it to become a food people specifically want. It belongs to Dagbon and the wider north of Ghana, and it is eaten in Burkina Faso and other parts of West Africa under related names. In Tamale and across the northern region it is street food and household food at once, sold with a hot pepper sauce and fried fish and often garnished with cabbage, carrot and sliced potato. The steaming happens twice, with a wash in between, which is the technical heart of the dish and the part that cannot be shortened. The flour is moistened until it forms small lumps, steamed, washed, drained, and steamed again on low heat, and only then is it dressed with groundnut oil and salt. That second steam is what turns it from damp meal into separate grains. It is served with beans, pasta or salad as well as the standard pepper sauce and fish, and it makes a full plate from an ingredient that costs almost nothing.

Ghana1 hrDeborah

Yamarita

Yamarita is yam in an egg and flour coating, fried until the crust is crisp and the inside stays soft. It is a Nigerian treatment of the country's most important tuber, and it is straightforwardly a modern dish rather than an inherited one. The name gives away its logic. Yamarita is yam plus the ending of dundun ata or, by the more commonly repeated account, a play on the Yoruba way of naming a fried thing. Whatever the derivation, it belongs to the same family of inventions as yam chips and yam balls: ways of turning a starch that is usually eaten soft into something you can pick up with your fingers at a party. It sits alongside the older Nigerian yam preparations rather than replacing them. Pounded yam is ceremonial, yam porridge is domestic, yam with egg sauce is breakfast, and yamarita is what appears on a small chops platter next to puff puff and spring rolls. That is a real position in Nigerian eating even if it is a recent one, and the dish has spread well beyond the households that first made it.

Nigeria1 hr 5 minLaila

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.

Nigeria50 minDebby

Senegalese Fataya

Fataya are Senegalese fried pastries, filled, folded into half moons and sold from small tables at the roadside across the country. They are cheap, they are everywhere, and they are made and sold overwhelmingly by women working from stands they set up themselves, which is a fair description of a great deal of Senegal's street food economy. The filling is where Senegal shows itself. Yassa is the base, the onion, lemon, mustard and peanut oil preparation that is one of the country's defining flavours, applied to fish or chicken. Fish is the more common street filling, reflecting a coastline that supplies the national diet. To that Senegalese cooks bring french fries and fried egg, which sound like additions from somewhere else and are in fact standard, supplying the fat and richness that the lean fish does not have. They are finished with ketchup and hot sauce poured over the top, which means no two bites are quite the same. Fataya sit in the same family as the fried filled pastries found across West Africa and beyond it, and what makes them Senegalese is entirely the yassa. The marinade is worth knowing on its own: sweet, tangy and slightly hot, and used across the region on chicken and fish well outside this dish.

Senegal1 hr 15 minBlessing

Liver suya, Nigerian spiced liver kebabs coated in groundnut and pepper yaji and grilled on skewers

Liver Suya (Liver Kebab)

Suya is not restricted to any one cut, and liver is among the most common of the alternatives. Kidney and tripe appear too, and the offal versions are cheaper, cook faster and carry the yaji spice differently from beef, which is a large part of why they have their own following rather than being a fallback. Liver takes spice better than muscle meat does. It is soft, mineral and slightly sweet, and it absorbs the groundnut and pepper coating almost immediately rather than needing time to marinate. It also cooks in minutes, which suits the trade: a suya vendor working a roadside grill at night needs something that goes from raw to served while the customer waits. The name changes across West Africa without the thing changing much. Suya in Nigeria, soya in Cameroon, chinchinga or sitsinga in Ghana, and brochettes in the Francophone countries. The spice blend, yaji, is what holds it together, and it has no fixed recipe: the composition varies by vendor and by region, and each is guarded. What is consistent is ground groundnut, chilli, ginger and garlic, and a heat level that varies from cook to cook while the intensity of flavour does not.

Nigeria45 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

Ndambé

Ndambé is a Senegalese black eyed pea stew, and its most recognisable form is not a bowl at all. It is loaded into a split baguette and eaten as a sandwich from a roadside stand, which is what most Senegalese picture when the word comes up. The baguette is a colonial inheritance that Senegal has thoroughly made its own. French bread arrived with colonial administration and is now baked and eaten across the country in quantities that have nothing to do with France, and the ndambé sandwich is one of the clearest examples of what happened to it: a West African bean stew, spiced with chilli and thickened with tomato, packed into a European loaf and sold for very little money. It is breakfast and dinner food rather than lunch, and Senegalese describe it as winter food, which in Senegal means the cooler months rather than anything a European would call winter. Sweet potato goes in in some households, and meat, usually beef or lamb, in others, though the stew is entirely good without either. Beyond the sandwich it is served with rice, couscous or on its own.

SenegalBlessing

Garantita

Garantita is a baked chickpea flour flan, sliced and eaten hot in a piece of baguette with cumin and harissa. It is Algerian street food in the most literal sense: sold from carts and small counters, cheap enough to be a default lunch, and eaten standing up. Its names change across the country. Garantita in Algiers, calentica in Oran, and karantita, karen or el hami in the west. In Algiers it also goes by el kebda el beida, the white liver, and it is described without embarrassment as the poor man's sandwich, which is a statement about price rather than quality. The origin story is a good one and should be treated as a story. It is said to come from Spanish soldiers at the fort of Santa Cruz in Oran in the 18th century, who ran out of provisions and had only chickpea flour, water and oil left, and whose cook combined them. The name is then traced to the Spanish caliente, meaning hot. The connection to Spanish chickpea cooking is real, since similar chickpea flour preparations exist across the western Mediterranean, but the specific tale of the soldiers is folklore rather than record. One rule is not negotiable: garantita is eaten hot, never cold.

AlgeriaBlessing

Fried Yam

Fried yam is called dundun in Yoruba, and it is one of the most eaten street foods in Nigeria. Yam is peeled, cut into thick chips, salted and fried until the outside crisps and the inside stays soft and floury. It is sold from roadside stands with a pepper sauce, and it is eaten at breakfast, at lunch and late at night. Yam is the crop that Nigeria produces more of than anywhere else in the world, and dundun is the most direct thing to do with it. It costs almost nothing, needs three ingredients, and the frying takes minutes. That combination is what makes it street food: a vendor with a pot of oil and a sack of yam is in business. Its usual partner is akara, the fried bean cake, and the pairing of dundun and akara with a ground pepper sauce is a standard Nigerian breakfast. It is also eaten with egg sauce, with fried fish, with stew, or on its own. The word dundun covers the fried treatment specifically, as distinct from the plain, pounded and porridge treatments of the same tuber, each of which occupies its own place on the Nigerian table.

Nigeria35 minAnthonyJ

Meat Pie

The Nigerian meat pie is a hand pie with a short, slightly flaky crust around minced beef, potato and carrot in a thick gravy. It is not the same thing as a British meat pie or a Jamaican patty, though it is related to both, and Nigerians will tell you the difference immediately: the pastry is denser and less sweet than a patty, and the filling is chunkier and more heavily seasoned than a British one. It is everywhere. Meat pies are sold from bakeries, from glass warmers in petrol stations, from hawkers at bus stops, and at every party alongside puff puff, chin chin and spring rolls on the small chops platter. They are eaten as breakfast, as brunch, as a snack, and with a soft drink or chilled juice. The pastry is where it is won or lost. The ratio of fat to flour is treated as a rule rather than a guideline in Nigerian kitchens: half the weight of the flour in margarine, and getting that ratio wrong is the single most common reason a home made meat pie comes out hard. The other is oven heat, which has to be watched rather than trusted, since ovens differ and an overbaked pie is dry.

Nigeria1 hr 5 minBeatrice

African Fish Roll

The fish roll is a West African street snack: a simple enriched dough wrapped around seasoned flaked fish and deep fried until crisp. It is eaten across Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana, sold from bakeries, roadside stands and glass warmers, and it sits on the small chops platter alongside meat pie, puff puff and spring rolls. Its name shifts with its shape. Rolled into a cylinder it is a fish roll; made in the manner of a folded half moon pie it is called a fish pie. The two are the same idea and Nigerians and Ghanaians use both terms. The source for this recipe gives Cameroonians the credit for making them best, which is the kind of claim that gets argued about rather than settled. Mackerel is the standard fish, called titus in Nigeria after a brand name that became the general term for the frozen fish sold across the country. It is steamed, boned, flaked and seasoned with onion, spring onion and cayenne, which is a short ingredient list doing a lot of work. The dough is where the technique sits: too much handling gives a hard roll rather than a crisp one, which the source identifies as the usual failure. Baking is possible and gives a lighter, less crisp result.

1 hr 30 minDebby

Mhajab, a North African stuffed flatbread folded into layers and cooked on a griddle

Mhajab - A Traditional North African Dish

Mhajab is a stuffed North African flatbread, and the technique is what makes it. A soft dough is stretched out until it is thin enough to see through, folded in from the sides and then from the top and bottom into a square parcel around a filling, and cooked flat on a griddle. The folding creates the layers, and the layers are the dish. It belongs to Algeria and Morocco and is closely related to the Moroccan msemen and rghaif, which use the same stretch and fold method without a filling. Mhajab is street food and it is household food for special occasions, which is a combination that usually indicates something that takes skill but not money. The filling is conventionally a cooked mixture of onion, tomato and pepper, sometimes with meat, and the version here uses beef with potato and carrot. Vegetable fillings are as common as meat ones. It is eaten on its own, or served alongside couscous, harira and salads with mint tea. Cooked on a griddle it comes out crisp outside and soft within; baked it is softer throughout and takes longer, which is the trade the source lays out honestly.

Algeria50 minDebby

Attiéké Steak Alloco

This is a plate rather than a dish: attiéké, steak and alloco together, which is how Ivorians eat all three. Each element is a staple in its own right and the combination is what turns them into a meal. Attiéké is the foundation. It is fermented cassava, grated and steamed into fine pale granules that look like couscous and taste nothing like it, carrying a distinct sourness from a fermentation of a few days. It originated in the coastal districts of Côte d'Ivoire centuries ago and is eaten at every meal of the day by Ivorians of every age. That sour note is the thing people either take to immediately or need a few platefuls to appreciate, in the same way sourdough divides opinion. Alloco is fried ripe plantain, and it is eaten across the region under different names: dodo in Nigeria, makemba in the Congo, amanda in Togo, kelewele in Ghana. Its caramelised sweetness against the sour attiéké is the balance the plate depends on, with the steak providing the third element. In Abidjan the combination is sold from roadside maquis and eaten with the fingers, and any drink at all is considered appropriate alongside it.

Côte d'Ivoire2 hr 50 minCuisine228

Mhadjeb

Mhadjeb, also written mhajeb, mahjouba or m'hadjeb depending on the region and the transliteration, is an Algerian stuffed flatbread built from semolina dough stretched until it is almost translucent, folded around a cooked filling of onion, tomato and pepper, then griddled flat. It belongs to street food and to Ramadan. Through the fasting month it appears on stalls across Algerian towns in the hour before sunset, stacked and sold by the piece, and it is one of the dishes most associated with the table at iftar. Outside Ramadan it is everyday food, made in quantity at home and eaten warm. The name carries a story that Algerians tell about its origin. Mahjouba was said to be a woman who did not leave her house, and in Algerian usage the word carries both meanings at once, the secluded woman and the honourable one. She made these breads and sent them out with her children to sell in the market. The dish took her name and kept it. What makes it technically distinctive is the stretching. The dough is worked with oil rather than flour, then pulled out by hand on an oiled surface until it is thin enough to read through, which is what gives the finished bread its layered, papery texture against a soft, well-cooked filling.

AlgeriaNympha

Asun, Nigerian smoked goat meat tossed with habanero, onions and bell peppers

Asun (Peppered Goat Meat)

Asun is smoked or roasted goat meat tossed through a fierce pepper and onion mix, and it is one of the fixtures of the Nigerian owambe, the large Yoruba party that runs on food and music. It arrives as part of the small chops circuit, alongside puff puff and peppered snails, and it disappears fast. Goat is the whole point. Yoruba speakers call it ogunfe, and it carries a stronger, more mineral flavour than beef that stands up to the quantity of scotch bonnet involved. The meat is simmered until tender before it ever meets fire, then roasted or grilled to dry the surface and pick up smoke, and only then does it go into the pepper mix. Skipping the first stage is the most common way it goes wrong, since goat that has not been softened stays tough no matter how long it spends in the pan. Sliced onions and bell peppers go in for sweetness against the heat rather than for bulk. Whether asun is a starter or something else is a matter people disagree about: the source archive files it under both appetizer and dessert, and Nigerians treat it as a small chop, a side to jollof rice, or a main course with plantain, depending entirely on the occasion.

Nigeria1 hr 15 minDebby

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