Nigerian Recipes

From Yamarita to Liver Suya (Liver Kebab), Asun (Peppered Goat Meat) to Chicken Suya. Everything Nigerian cooks, as it is cooked at home.

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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.

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45 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook

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Chicken Suya

Suya is skewered meat coated in yaji, a dry peanut based spice blend, and it is the best known street food in Nigeria. It comes from the Hausa people of the north, where it is also called tsire, and it spread from there across West Africa. Sudan has a close relative in agashe. Yaji is what makes it suya rather than grilled meat. The blend is built on ground peanut, usually in the form of kuli kuli crushed to a powder, with ginger, chilli, onion powder and other seasonings, and the peanut is what gives suya its particular nuttiness and the slightly gritty coating that clings to the meat. Meat without yaji is not suya, whatever else is done to it. Beef and ram are the traditional cuts, along with kidney, liver and tripe, and chicken is the newer arrival that has become common. It is sold at night from roadside grills, cut on a board and handed over in newspaper with sliced raw onion, tomato and cabbage, and the raw onion alongside the hot spice is not a garnish but part of how it is eaten. The one thing worth knowing before making it is that yaji contains peanut, which matters to anyone with an allergy.

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1 hr 25 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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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.

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1 hr 5 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by Laila · Africook

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Peppered Snail: Spicy Nigerian Finger Food

Peppered snail is party food in Nigeria. It arrives on a plate with cocktail sticks, it is eaten standing up with a drink in the other hand, and it belongs to celebrations, family gatherings, weekend events and the kind of occasion where people are moving between conversations rather than sitting down to a meal. The snails are African giant land snails, considerably larger than the garden snails eaten in Europe, and their texture is the whole point: firm, dense and chewy, closer to a scallop or a squid than to anything on a butcher's counter. They carry almost no flavour of their own, which is why they can take the heat they are given. The pepper sauce, built on scotch bonnet, onion, garlic and bell pepper, is what you actually taste, and the snail is what carries it. Snail is expensive in Nigeria relative to most proteins, which contributes to its place at events rather than at weekday meals. It is a dish that signals the occasion is worth something, and that association is as much a part of why it is served as the taste is.

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55 minMediumNigeria

Recipe by Debby · Africook

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Nigerian Recipes

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Yamarita