Recipes

Buka Stew With Assorted Meats (Obe Ata)

Buka stew is the pepper stew of western Nigeria, named for the places that made it famous. A buka is a small, cheap local eating house, and the buka is where working Lagos eats: fresh food, several dishes, no cooking at home, and no pretensions about any of it. The stew belongs to those kitchens and carries their signature. It is a pepper stew rather than a tomato stew, and the distinction is the whole recipe: tatashe and rodo dominate and tomato is kept back, which is the reverse of the everyday Nigerian stew ratio. The palm oil is bleached first, heated until it changes character, and that step produces the specific aroma that makes a buka identifiable from the street. Seasoning is kept minimal on purpose, because the peppers and the oil are doing the work. It is made with assorted meats, the cow parts that a household kitchen might skip and a buka never does, deep fried before they go into the pot. The women who run these kitchens are known collectively in Nigerian speech as Iya Basira, a name that stands in for all of them, and mama put is what the roadside version is called. Buka stew is eaten with white rice, beans, yam, fried plantain or agege bread.

★★★★★Highest Rated

50 minMediumNigeria

Recipe by Jennifer · Africook

Djablani

Djablani is a Malian drink of ginger, lemon and baobab, served cold and sharply flavoured. It belongs to the family of fresh homemade drinks sold in bags and bottles across West Africa, alongside bissap made from hibiscus and dakar made from tamarind, prepared in quantity in households and sold by the roadside. The baobab is what places it. The tree grows across the Sahel and is one of the defining plants of the Malian landscape, distinctive in shape, able to survive extreme heat and poor soil, and long lived on a scale that has made it a landmark in its own right. Its fruit gives a pale tart pulp used in drinks and porridges across the region, and its leaves are dried and ground for soup. Ginger carries the rest. West African ginger drinks are made strong, and the heat in a properly made djablani is genuine rather than suggested, which is what the sugar and the lemon are there to balance. It is served cold, often with mint, and it is refreshment in a climate where that word means something specific. Fresh drinks of this kind are a category of their own in West African hospitality: made at home, given to guests, and sold cheaply on the street.

★★★★★Highest Rated

15 minEasyMali

Recipe by Deborah · Africook

Red-Red Stew

Red red is a Ghanaian black-eyed pea stew, and the name is a plain description of what it looks like. The beans are cooked in red palm oil, zomi, with tomato, and both give the dish the deep rust colour it is named for. It is usually vegetarian, which is worth noting because it is unusual among West African stews in being so by default rather than by adaptation. The beans carry it, and the palm oil provides the richness that meat would otherwise supply. Some households add fish or meat, but the standard version does not need it. Zomi is not interchangeable with ordinary red palm oil. It is palm oil that has been heated and infused, and it carries a deeper, slightly smoky flavour that is much of what makes red red taste Ghanaian rather than generically bean-stewed. The classic accompaniment is fried plantain, and the pairing is close to inseparable, the sweetness of ripe plantain against the savoury, oily beans is the whole balance of the meal. Gari is often served alongside too. It is cheap, filling and slow-cooked, and it is street food as much as home food across Ghana. Black-eyed peas are the usual bean, but the dish tolerates others without complaint.

EasyGhana

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

Vegan Suya (Spiced Grilled Mushrooms)

Oyster mushrooms grilled and tossed in suya spice. It is a plant-based version of the Nigerian street food, and it works better than most meat substitutions do. **The traditional suya spice contains ground peanuts, and this recipe includes them.** The source flags it and offers to leave them out, which is honest, but it is worth stating clearly, because a peanut allergy and a suya spice blend are a genuinely dangerous combination and the name gives no warning. Suya proper is skewered beef, ram or chicken rubbed in yaji, the spice blend of ground roasted peanuts, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion powder and paprika, and grilled over open coals. It is Hausa in origin, from northern Nigeria, and it is sold across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Ghana and parts of Sudan. Kyinkyinga is the Ghanaian name, agashe the Sudanese. Oyster mushrooms are the right substitution and not an arbitrary one. Shredded, they have a fibrous, layered structure that genuinely resembles pulled meat, they take on the dry rub readily, and they char well. Most vegetables do neither. The source's method is very compressed, one step reads "put in a preheated medium", with the word oven missing, and has been filled out below.

30 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by duchessnena · Africook