Ivorian Recipes

From Placali to Ivorian Jollof Rice, Fufu to Ivorian Pepper Soup. Everything Ivorian cooks, as it is cooked at home.

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Cold Guinea Fowl

Whole guinea fowl cooked slowly in orange and apple juice with garlic and pepper, then browned in a hot oven, cooled, carved and served cold. The source places it in Ivory Coast. Guinea fowl is West African, and that is the useful thing to know here. The bird is native to the region, its English name comes from the Guinea coast, and it was carried to Europe by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, where French and Italian producers have since become among the largest in the world. So a guinea fowl recipe from Ivory Coast is the bird in its home rather than an import. It cooks differently from chicken and the difference is fat. Guinea fowl carries roughly half as much, and it is a slightly smaller bird, so it dries out easily. This recipe answers that directly: it is poached slowly in a large quantity of liquid for an hour and a half or more before it ever meets dry heat, and the browning at the end is brief. That order is the whole design, and reversing it would produce something tough. Serving it cold is a genuine choice rather than a leftovers strategy. Cold poultry with fruit and salad is a summer and celebration format, and the source suggests Sunday lunch or a small Christmas dinner.

2 hr 35 minMediumIvory Coast

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

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Baked Plantain Loaf

Ripe plantains mashed to a paste, combined with rice flour and turmeric-infused oil, then baked in a loaf tin and sliced. The source places it in Ivory Coast, where plantain in every form is close to universal. It is worth being clear about what this is, because the title is misleading in two directions. It is not sliced plantain roasted in an oven, which is what most people mean by baked plantain. And the recipe uses rice flour as a binder and turmeric for colour, which makes it a plantain loaf or cake, closer in construction to a steamed pudding than to a side dish. The slug says load rather than loaf, which appears to be a typo in the original; the URL has been kept exactly as it is. One ingredient does not fit the stated origin. Chilli sambal is Indonesian and Malay, and it is not part of Ivorian cooking. It may be a substitution the contributor made for a local pepper paste, but the source does not say so, and rather than invent an explanation it has been flagged. The source's nutritional comparisons with potato have not been carried across. What matters for cooking is that ripe plantain is sweet and starchy, and that is what makes the loaf hold together.

1 hr 30 minMediumIvory Coast

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

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Rice and Offal Balls

Cooked rice bound with minced liver, onion and egg, rolled into balls, crumbed and deep-fried. The contributor learned it from their grandmother in Ivory Coast. The dish belongs to a very widely distributed family, the fried rice croquette. Italian arancini, Middle Eastern kibbeh, Nigerian rice balls and this all work on the same principle: a starch cooked, cooled, bound with something rich and shaped, then fried so the outside crisps around a soft interior. The cooling is not optional in any of them. Warm rice does not hold its shape and the balls collapse in the oil. Offal is the other thing worth taking seriously. Liver and other variety meats are used across West African cooking as good ingredients rather than as economies, kilishi, dambu, gizdodo and asun all belong to the same attitude. Liver in particular is soft enough to bind rice without any additional fat, which is exactly why it works here. Two practical notes. The double coating, breadcrumbs then egg wash, is the reverse of the usual order, and the source may have it backwards; the conventional sequence is flour, egg, then crumbs. The source's nutritional inventory has not been carried across.

1 hr 15 minMediumIvory Coast

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

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Kedjenou (Ivorian Sealed-Pot Chicken)

Kedjenou is chicken and vegetables sealed in a pot and cooked slowly with almost no added liquid, so the bird cooks in its own juices. It is Ivorian, and the source associates it particularly with the Baoulé. The method is the entire dish and it is genuinely unusual. Traditionally it is cooked in a canari, an earthenware jar with a narrow opening, which is sealed and set over a wood fire or coals. Because so little liquid goes in and almost none escapes, everything the chicken releases stays in the pot and concentrates. The result is intensely flavoured rather than diluted, the opposite of a stew, where liquid goes in and draws flavour outward. The name reflects the technique too. Kedjenou is generally understood to refer to shaking, the pot is shaken periodically rather than opened and stirred, because lifting the lid would let the steam out. This recipe reproduces that with foil under a tight lid in a low oven, and it works. Eggplant, tomato, onion, chilli, ginger and thyme are the standard vegetables. Guinea fowl is as traditional as chicken and arguably more so. The source's ingredient list gives almost no quantities and splits garlic across two lines. Working amounts are given below.

2 hr 50 minEasyIvory Coast · African

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

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