Recipes

Liver Fried Rice

Liver fried rice is fried rice built around beef liver, and it belongs to the West African fried rice tradition rather than the Chinese one. Liver is a common and inexpensive protein across the region, and using it here gives a mineral depth that chicken or shrimp do not. The rice is where the technique sits. It is cooked in seasoned chicken stock rather than water, so it carries flavour before it is ever fried, then cooled completely, spread on a tray and refrigerated, or briefly frozen, before it goes into the pan. Cold rice is the single most important thing in any fried rice: fresh, warm rice releases steam and starch and turns to a sticky mass, while cold grains separate and fry. Liver is unforgiving in the other direction. Cooked correctly it is tender and almost creamy; cooked a minute too long it goes tough and dry, and there is no recovering it. It is cooked briefly in liquid and then fried, and it goes into the wok before the vegetables so it is not sitting over heat while everything else cooks. The dish is served with fried chicken, which is how the source presents it and which makes it a substantial meal rather than a side.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hr 40 minMediumTogo · Nigerian

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook

Oven Baked Jollof Rice

Oven-baked jollof takes the standard West African one-pot and moves it into the oven, where the heat surrounds the dish rather than coming from below. The reason to bother is practical. Stovetop jollof burns from the base, and getting it right means managing heat carefully, too high and the bottom catches badly, too low and the rice steams unevenly. In an oven the heat is even, the rice cooks through without attention, and the pot cannot scorch in the same way. For anyone who has ruined jollof on a hob, that is a real argument. What you trade away is the smoky note. That flavour comes precisely from the bottom of the pot catching slightly, and an oven does not give it. Cooks who want both build the base on the hob and finish in the oven. Everything else is unchanged: the same reduced tomato, red pepper, onion and chilli base, the same long-grain parboiled rice, the same rule about not stirring once it is covered. It scales well, which makes it useful for cooking for numbers.

EasyNigeria

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook

Ivorian Jollof Rice

Ivorian jollof is the Francophone entry in a dish the Anglophone countries argue about most loudly. It carries the same tomato base as its neighbours and seasons it with curry powder, thyme, ginger, garlic and scotch bonnet, and it commonly cooks the cabbage and carrots in the pot with the rice rather than serving them separately. Côte d'Ivoire calls it jollof, and the wider Francophone West African name for the family is riz gras, meaning fat rice. That name describes the method accurately: rice cooked in an oil rich tomato broth until it takes all of it up. In Côte d'Ivoire the dish belongs to the same occasions it does everywhere else in the region, which is to say weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies and any gathering that expects to feed a crowd from one pot. The origin is not seriously disputed by anyone who looks into it. Jollof descends from the rice tradition of the Senegambian coast, associated with the Jolof polity that held parts of present day Senegal and the Gambia between roughly 1350 and 1549, in a region documented as the Rice Coast for the grains grown along the Senegal River. One account traces its spread through the Djula traders of the Mali empire. Neither Nigeria nor Ghana invented it, which neither country lets get in the way of the argument.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hrMediumCôte d'Ivoire

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook

No Corn Starch Rice Cakes (Ablo)

Ablo, also written abolo, is a steamed rice cake with a light, springy crumb, eaten across the coastal stretch of West Africa where Togo, Benin, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire meet. It is white, faintly sweet, faintly sour, and built to be torn and dipped. Its texture is the result of fermentation rather than of any raising agent alone. Rice is soaked, ground and left to rise, and the sourness that develops in that time is the difference between an ablo and a plain steamed dumpling. In Benin the cakes are steamed wrapped in banana leaf bundles, which leaves a green, faintly grassy note that a metal mould cannot give. Ablo occupies the position that bread occupies elsewhere: it is the mild thing on the plate that the sauce is for. It is eaten with thick stews and grilled fish, and it belongs equally to a party table and a home meal. In a food culture where most starches are pounded or stirred, a steamed and leavened cake is a distinct approach, and one that Togolese, Beninese, Ghanaian and Ivorian cooks share across their borders.

★★★★★Highest Rated

2 hr 10 minMediumBenin

Recipe by AnthonyJ · Africook