Recettes Uganda

Ugandan Rolex Chapati

The rolex has nothing to do with watches. The name compresses rolled eggs into one word, and that is exactly what it is: an omelette with vegetables rolled inside a chapati, made to order at a roadside stand and handed over in paper. It is the street food of Kampala and now of the whole country. Vendors work from small stalls with a hot plate and a stack of chapatis, and the whole transaction takes a couple of minutes. Its rise is generally placed in Kampala among university students, who wanted something filling and cheap, and it spread from there across Uganda and into the country's international reputation. The chapati underneath it is itself a piece of history. Flatbread of this kind came to East Africa with Indian migration, particularly the labourers and traders who arrived under British colonial administration, and it has been fully absorbed into Ugandan and Kenyan eating. What Uganda did was wrap an omelette in it. That is a small innovation and it produced a national dish, which is roughly how street food has always worked: someone puts two cheap things together and the city decides it is right.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

40 minEasyUganda · East Africa

Recette de Debby · Africook

Matoke

Matoke is green cooking banana, and in Uganda it is close to being the national dish. The word names both the banana variety and the dish made from it, which tells you how central it is. These are not the bananas eaten raw. They are harvested green, when the flesh is firm and starchy rather than sweet, and they must be cooked. Treated this way they behave much more like a potato than a fruit, they take on the flavour of whatever they are cooked with, and they fill you up in a way that has made them a staple across Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda. The classic Ugandan preparation steams the peeled bananas, often wrapped in their own leaves, until soft, then mashes them. Served that way it is the base of a meal, eaten with groundnut sauce, beans or meat. It is also known as ebitookye in parts of Uganda and as matoke or mataba more broadly across the region. The version here is the stewed form rather than the steamed and mashed one, sliced bananas simmered with tomato, chilli and lemon into something closer to a vegetable stew, finished with coriander. Both are matoke, and which one is meant depends entirely on where you are. Peeling raw green banana stains the hands and the sap is sticky; oiled hands help.

EasyUganda

Recette de Blessing · Africook