Senegalese Recipes

Senegalese Chicken Yassa

Chicken Yassa is one of Senegal's most internationally celebrated dishes, a deeply flavoured stew where chicken is marinated in an aggressive mixture of lemon juice, mustard, and onions, grilled or seared until charred, then slowly cooked with an enormous quantity of caramelised onions until they collapse into a rich, tangy, slightly sweet sauce. The dish is a masterclass in the power of onions as a flavour base. Five or six large onions per chicken is not unusual, they cook down dramatically and transform into a completely different thing: sweet, golden, and complex. The lemon keeps the sauce bright and the mustard adds a subtle depth. Yassa is eaten across Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau and wherever Senegalese communities have settled globally.

★★★★★Highest Rated

MediumSenegal

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

Vermicelle Poulet

Vermicelle poulet is Senegalese celebration food that happens to be very easy to make, which is an unusual combination. Broken rice vermicelli is toasted in butter and steamed, and braised chicken in a mustard and onion sauce is served over it. That is the whole dish. It appears at weddings, baptisms and the gatherings that mark occasions, and it is found in the most modest Senegalese households and in the country's best restaurants without much changing between them. Its status comes from the vermicelli rather than the technique, since imported wheat and rice noodles carried a cost and a cachet that plain rice did not. The sauce is the Senegalese signature. Yellow mustard and onion cooked down together, sharpened with vinegar, is the same base that carries chicken yassa, and it is one of the most recognisable flavour combinations in the country's cooking. The mustard is not a French borrowing so much as a French ingredient absorbed completely into a Senegalese idiom. Thickened lightly with flour and spooned over toasted vermicelli, it makes a dish that looks like far more work than it is.

★★★★★Highest Rated

50 minEasySenegal

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Bassi salté is Senegalese millet couscous served with a meat and vegetable sauce, studded with raisins, chickpeas and white beans. Its full name is thiéré bassi salté, and it is one of the most demanding dishes in the Senegalese repertoire. The grain is the point of difference. This is not wheat couscous but thiakry, made from millet, the ancestral West African cereal, cultivated in the Sahel for thousands of years before wheat or maize arrived. That matters both culturally and practically: millet couscous is naturally gluten-free, and it needs a binder, which is where lalo comes in. Lalo is powdered baobab leaf, and it holds the steamed grains together in a way that wheat gluten would do on its own. It is festival food. Bassi salté is traditionally eaten at Tamkharit, the Senegalese observance of Ashura, and the effort involved, steaming the couscous twice, building the sauce over hours, forming the diaga meatballs separately, is part of what makes it appropriate to the occasion. Its defining flavour is the balance between savoury and sweet. Raisins and sometimes dates go in alongside the mutton and root vegetables, which is deliberate rather than incidental. The source's ingredient list is badly scrambled and its sauce timing is not credible; both are flagged below.

2 hr 45 minHardSenegal

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

Yassa Fish and Shrimp

Poisson yassa is the fish version of Senegal's best known dish, and it works on the same principle as chicken yassa: a marinade of lemon, mustard, garlic and onion that becomes the sauce, with a very large quantity of onion cooked down into it. Yassa comes from the Casamance region in southern Senegal and is now made across the country and throughout the Senegalese diaspora. The mustard is a French ingredient absorbed entirely into a Senegalese idiom, and the resemblance the source draws to a French sauce à l'onion is fair as far as it goes, though yassa is sharper and carries far more onion. Four large onions to two and a half pounds of fish is the ratio, and it is not a mistake. The onions cook down into a soft, tangy mass that is as much the dish as the fish is. The technique is straightforward: marinate, cook the fish and set it aside, cook the onions in the leftover marinade, then return the fish to warm through in the sauce. Shrimp can go in alongside. It is served with rice most often, though this version suggests potatoes.

★★★★★Highest Rated

40 minEasySenegal

Recipe by Cuisine228 · Africook