Nigerian Recipes

Asaro (Nigerian Yam Porridge)

Asaro is yam cooked down in a seasoned pepper base with palm oil until part of it collapses into a thick, orange-red mash while some pieces stay whole. It comes from the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and is now eaten across the country. The texture is the dish. Mashing all of it gives you something closer to a purée; leaving it all in pieces gives you yam in sauce. Asaro is deliberately between the two, enough breaks down to thicken everything, enough survives to give you something to bite. The palm oil is not incidental either: it supplies the colour and a distinct earthy richness that no other oil reproduces. There is a naming point the source raises and gets broadly right. What Nigerians call porridge is closer to what English calls pottage, a thick one-pot dish of a starch cooked with vegetables and sometimes meat, rather than the European breakfast sense of a grain cooked in liquid. The two words are used interchangeably in Nigeria. The source also identifies mpotompoto as the Ghanaian counterpart. The dishes are close relatives rather than the same thing, and that has been noted rather than asserted as fact.

1 hr 10 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

Plantain Porridge

Plantain porridge is unripe plantain cooked down with vegetables, palm oil and pepper into a thick, savoury one-pot dish, a Nigerian staple that behaves much more like a potato stew than anything the word porridge suggests in English. The ripeness question is the one that decides the dish. Ripe plantain is sweeter and more immediately appealing, and many people default to it. Unripe green plantain is what this dish is properly made with: it is starchy rather than sweet, holds its shape through long cooking rather than collapsing, and takes on the flavour of the pot instead of fighting it with sugar. Cooked ripe, the porridge turns sweet and mushy. Unripe plantain is also lower in sugar and higher in resistant starch, which is why it appears frequently in Nigerian cooking aimed at people managing blood sugar. Ugu or spinach goes in near the end, and crayfish, dried fish or smoked fish are common additions. Palm oil supplies the colour and much of the flavour. It is filling enough to be a meal on its own and is eaten at breakfast as often as at dinner.

EasyNigeria

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

Fluffy Pancakes

The thick, risen pancake is a North American and British form rather than an African one, and the source for this recipe says so directly: it describes itself as a basic UK recipe. It is included here as a plain reference version, not as a dish with a claim on the continent. That distinction matters because Africa has its own pancakes and they are not this. The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and deliberately savoury, carrying onion and ground pepper in the batter alongside the sugar. Hausa masa is a fermented rice cake, spongy and slightly sour, cooked in a pan of round wells. Ethiopian injera is a fermented teff flatbread that functions as a plate. Each of those is a distinct thing with its own technique and its own place at a table. What this recipe offers is the baking powder raised, egg and milk enriched, butter cooked pancake that most of the world now recognises from breakfast menus. It is genuinely good and genuinely simple, and there is no reason not to make it. There is also no reason to describe it as African cooking, and the honest position is to present it as what it is.

★★★★★Highest Rated

30 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by Jennifer · Africook

Simple Pasta Salad Recipe (With Video)

The mayonnaise dressed vegetable salad is a fixture of the Nigerian party table, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is not a salad in the European sense at all. There are no leaves at the centre of it. It is built on cooked vegetables, sweetcorn, egg and sometimes macaroni or baked beans, bound in mayonnaise and evaporated milk, and it is served cold in a large bowl alongside jollof rice and fried plantain. It arrived through colonial and post independence British influence on Nigerian catering, and it has been thoroughly domesticated since. The evaporated milk in the dressing is the clearest marker of that: it is not a British addition, and it gives the dressing a sweetness and a thinner consistency than mayonnaise alone. Nigerians of a certain age associate it directly with owambe, the large celebration parties where the food is served in quantity. This particular recipe is a contemporary quick version rather than a documented traditional dish. It uses macaroni, carrot, peas, sweetcorn, lettuce and egg with a mayonnaise and milk dressing, and it is presented by its author as an everyday meal rather than as party food. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to that broader Nigerian salad practice; what cannot be established from the source is any particular lineage for the recipe itself.

★★★★★Highest Rated

35 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by Amako Blessing · Africook