Recipes

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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hr 25 minEasyNigeria

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

Grilled Shito Wings

Grilled shito wings are chicken wings grilled and then coated in shito, Ghana's dark chilli sauce, and returned briefly to the heat so the sauce sets onto the skin. It is a modern preparation built on a traditional condiment rather than an inherited dish, and it is none the worse for that. Shito is the whole point. The word is Ga, the language of Accra, and simply means pepper, though it has come to name the specific dark sauce made from dried fish, ground prawn, chilli, ginger, garlic and tomato cooked down in oil. Its smokiness and depth are what a plain grilled wing lacks, and glazing rather than marinating with it keeps that character intact. The order matters. The wings are seasoned and marinated plainly first, with salt, oil, pepper, lime and soy, then grilled through, and only then coated in shito and given a short final spell at reduced heat. Shito applied at the start would burn long before the chicken cooked, since it is already a cooked, oily, sugar-free but solids-heavy sauce. Doing it this way gives a wing that is properly cooked underneath and lacquered on the outside.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hr 20 minEasyGhana

Recipe by Jennifer · Africook

Oven Baked Jollof Rice

Oven-baked jollof takes the standard West African one-pot and moves it into the oven, where the heat surrounds the dish rather than coming from below. The reason to bother is practical. Stovetop jollof burns from the base, and getting it right means managing heat carefully, too high and the bottom catches badly, too low and the rice steams unevenly. In an oven the heat is even, the rice cooks through without attention, and the pot cannot scorch in the same way. For anyone who has ruined jollof on a hob, that is a real argument. What you trade away is the smoky note. That flavour comes precisely from the bottom of the pot catching slightly, and an oven does not give it. Cooks who want both build the base on the hob and finish in the oven. Everything else is unchanged: the same reduced tomato, red pepper, onion and chilli base, the same long-grain parboiled rice, the same rule about not stirring once it is covered. It scales well, which makes it useful for cooking for numbers.

EasyNigeria

Recipe by Cuisine228 · 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