Recettes

Chtitha Batata

Chtitha batata is the Algerian potato stew, and it is built on dersa. Dersa is a paste of garlic and chilli ground in a mortar with cumin, paprika, black pepper and cayenne, and it is the starting point for a whole family of Algerian dishes, chtitha among them. The technique is straightforward and the order matters. The dersa is fried first until fragrant, which is what opens up the spices, and the potatoes go in and are turned through it so every surface is coated before any liquid arrives. Tomato paste follows, then just enough water to cover, and it cooks until the potatoes are soft and the sauce has thickened around them. It is vegan as written and eaten as a main course on its own terms, not as a compromise, which is unusual for a stew of this kind. Meat can go into the sauce and often does, and chickpeas are a common addition that the source's prose mentions though the recipe itself does not include them. It keeps four days refrigerated and reheats well, and the flavour improves overnight as the dersa works into the potatoes.

55 minEasyAlgeria

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Banana Soup

Bananas and their cooking relatives are among the most important foods in Africa's Great Lakes region and across its humid tropical belt. In Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern DR Congo and parts of Tanzania and Kenya, the plant is a staple rather than a fruit: green cooking bananas are steamed, mashed, worked into stews and eaten daily, and the sweet ripe banana is only one use among many. That distinction between cooking banana and ripe fruit matters for placing this recipe. It uses ripe bananas, blended smooth with coconut milk and finished with curry powder and turmeric, which puts it closer to the spiced coconut cooking of the Swahili coast than to the green banana dishes of the interior. The pairing of coconut milk with warm spice is genuinely East African coastal; the blended sweet banana base is not a documented preparation from any specific tradition. This is best understood as a contemporary dish rather than an inherited one. It uses African ingredients and an East African coastal flavour logic, but no country, community or lineage can honestly be attached to it on the evidence available. What it does well is show what ripe banana does under savoury treatment, which is a legitimate thing for a recipe to do without claiming a heritage it does not have.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

50 minEasy

Recette de Laila · Africook

Ethiopian Berbere Cabbage - Atakilt Wat

Atakilt wat is the vegetable stew of the Ethiopian table: cabbage, carrot and potato cooked down with onion, garlic and spice until they are tender without collapsing. The name is Amharic, atakilt for vegetable and wat for stew, which describes it exactly. Its place is on the shared injera platter rather than on a plate of its own. An Ethiopian meal is served as several dishes arranged together on a single round of injera, and atakilt wat is almost always among them, providing a mild, sweet counterweight to the sharper and hotter wat alongside it. It is the dish that gives the platter its balance. That role also makes it central to fasting. The Ethiopian Orthodox calendar includes many days on which no animal products are eaten, and the country's vegan cooking is consequently deep and long practised rather than recent. Atakilt wat contains nothing animal at any point, which is why it appears as reliably during fasting periods as outside them. Berbere, the chilli and spice blend built on chilli, garlic, ginger, fenugreek and a long list of aromatics, is what carries it, though this version keeps the quantity modest so the vegetables stay forward.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 5 minEasyEthiopia · East Africa

Recette de Debby · Africook

Shiro Wat (Ethiopian Chickpea Stew)

Shiro wat is ground chickpea stew, and it is among the most eaten dishes in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Onion, garlic, tomato and berbere are cooked down in oil, chickpea flour is whisked in, and the result thickens to something between a thick gravy and a puree, smooth enough to spread and eaten with injera. Its position has a great deal to do with the religious calendar. Ethiopian Orthodox practice includes a very large number of fasting days, on which no meat, eggs or dairy are eaten, and shiro contains none of them. It is standard on Wednesdays and Fridays, through the eight weeks of Tsom, the Great Lent, and it is eaten during Ramadan by Ethiopian and Eritrean Muslims too. That is a dish serving two religions in one country without modification. It is also cheap and quick, which explains the rest of its reach. Shiro powder, sold ready mixed with the spices already in it, is available across Ethiopia and increasingly abroad, in two kinds: mitten shiro, which is red and carries berbere, and netch shiro, which is white and mild. The dish takes different forms by consistency and name: shiro fessess is runny and served over injera with chillies, shiro tegamino is thick and cooked in an earthenware pot until it bubbles and caramelises at the base, and shiro fit fit shreds injera through it for breakfast.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

35 minEasyEthiopia

Recette de Blessing · Africook