Senegalese Recipes

Dibi (Senegalese Grilled Lamb)

Dibi is Senegalese grilled lamb, sold from street stalls and wood-fired grills and served in bite sized pieces on paper with a mustard and onion sauce. It is one of the country's defining street foods and it is eaten with the fingers. The same dish exists across the region under a different name. In Guinea and the Gambia it is called afra, and the format is the same: meat seasoned and grilled over wood, hacked into pieces, smothered in onions and served in a brown paper bag that catches the drippings. A French baguette turns it into a sandwich, which is how a great many people eat it. The sauce is the Senegalese signature and it is the same mustard-and-onion base that carries chicken yassa. Onion is cooked down slowly in oil with grainy French mustard until soft and lightly browned, then loosened with water to a spoonable consistency. It is tangy rather than hot, and it cuts the fat of the grilled lamb. Attiéké, fried plantain or chips go alongside, and while dibi is filed as an appetizer it is substantial enough to be a whole meal, which is how it is usually eaten.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hrEasySenegal

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hr 15 minMediumSenegal

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

Crispy Beef Empanadas

Discs of short pastry filled with seasoned beef mince, sealed and fried until blistered and crisp. Empanadas are Spanish in origin and are now most strongly associated with Latin America, where nearly every country has its own version. The name comes from empanar, Spanish for to wrap in bread. The form travelled with Spanish and Portuguese colonisation and took root everywhere it landed: Argentine empanadas baked and filled with beef and olives, Chilean pino with egg and olives, Colombian versions made with maize dough and fried, and Filipino ones sweetened. The source is right that the family extends to the Philippines and Indonesia, though describing empanadas as European Philippines is confused phrasing. Africa has its own members of the same broad family of filled savoury pastries, and several are on this site, Nigerian meat pie, Senegalese fataya, East African sambusa. They are relatives rather than the same thing, and the Nigerian meat pie in particular is close enough that the two are often mistaken for each other. The one genuinely useful technique here is resting the dough balls for an hour or two before pressing them out. Rested gluten relaxes, so the rounds hold their shape instead of springing back. The source's ingredient list is scrambled and has been rebuilt from its method.

1 hr 10 minMediumSenegal

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook

Yassa Fish and Shrimp

Poisson yassa is the fish version of Senegal's best known dish, and it works on the same principle as chicken yassa: a marinade of lemon, mustard, garlic and onion that becomes the sauce, with a very large quantity of onion cooked down into it. Yassa comes from the Casamance region in southern Senegal and is now made across the country and throughout the Senegalese diaspora. The mustard is a French ingredient absorbed entirely into a Senegalese idiom, and the resemblance the source draws to a French sauce à l'onion is fair as far as it goes, though yassa is sharper and carries far more onion. Four large onions to two and a half pounds of fish is the ratio, and it is not a mistake. The onions cook down into a soft, tangy mass that is as much the dish as the fish is. The technique is straightforward: marinate, cook the fish and set it aside, cook the onions in the leftover marinade, then return the fish to warm through in the sauce. Shrimp can go in alongside. It is served with rice most often, though this version suggests potatoes.

★★★★★Highest Rated

40 minEasySenegal

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook