Recettes

Tapalapa

Tapalapa is a West African bread: a dense, chewy loaf with a firm crust, baked long and scored across the top, and sold from roadside ovens and small bakeries rather than from supermarkets. It is bought fresh in the morning, torn rather than sliced, and eaten with whatever the household has. Its role is that of daily bread in the most literal sense. In the countries where it is baked, the tapalapa loaf is a breakfast item, split and filled with beans, egg, fried fish or a spread, and it is also what appears alongside a stew at other times of day. Baked in a wood fired oven, which is how most of it is still produced, it takes on a crust and a faint smokiness that a domestic oven does not reproduce. The bread belongs to a wider West African tradition of European style leavened loaves that were absorbed into local baking and then developed independently, arriving somewhere quite distinct from any European original. Tapalapa is denser and chewier than a baguette, keeps considerably better, and is built to hold a filling without collapsing. The countries of the region that bake it treat it as their own, and the question of exactly where it began is not settled.

2 hrLaila

Kenkey

Kenkey is fermented maize dough, wrapped in banana leaf or corn husk and steamed into firm parcels. It is sour, and the sourness is the whole character of it. The fermentation runs one to three days before anything is cooked, and a kenkey that has been rushed is immediately identifiable to anyone who eats it regularly. It comes from the Ga people of Accra and the surrounding coast, who have been making it for centuries, and it has spread across Ghana without losing that origin. Ga kenkey and Fante kenkey are recognised as distinct: the wrapping differs, and so does the ratio of fermented to fresh dough, which changes how sour the finished parcel is. Kenkey is street food in the most functional sense. It is bought in its wrapping, which serves as the plate, and eaten with fried fish, shito and a raw pepper and tomato grind, standing up or sitting on a bench. The wrapping is not presentation; it is what the dough is steamed in and what keeps it for days without refrigeration. That combination of sour dough, hot pepper and fried fish is one of the most recognisable plates in West Africa.

Ghana55 minLaila

Awara, a Northern Nigerian fried soy bean cake, served hot with pepper and sliced vegetables

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Awara is Northern Nigerian soy bean cake, and it is one of the clearest examples of an introduced crop becoming a genuinely local food. Soy beans are not indigenous to West Africa. Awara, as the Hausa make and eat it, is not found anywhere the crop came from. What separates awara from tofu is the frying. The process to the curd stage is the same: beans are soaked, ground, strained to a milk, heated, and set with an acid or a mineral coagulant, then pressed. Where East Asian tofu is usually finished at the press, awara is cut, seasoned and fried until the outside is golden and firm. That frying step is the dish, and it produces something with a texture and a flavour of its own. It is street food and snack food, sold ready made across the north because the process at home is long. Awara is served hot with ground pepper and oil, and increasingly with sliced fresh pepper, cabbage and cucumber alongside. It is eaten with pap or kunu at breakfast, and at any hour after that. It is also the north's most practical answer for anyone eating no meat, which is a role it has held far longer than the word vegetarian has been in common use in Nigeria.

Nigeria1 hr 30 minJennifer

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.

Mali15 minDeborah

Groundnut Sweet

Groundnut sweet is peanuts set in caramelised sugar and cut into blocks, and it is made from three things: groundnuts, sugar and water. In Cameroon it is sold by the piece from roadside tables and market stalls, cut from a slab with a knife, and it is among the cheapest sweet things available anywhere in the country. Groundnuts are grown across Cameroon and across the West African savannah generally, and the confection follows the crop. Similar sweets exist wherever groundnuts are abundant and sugar is affordable, which covers a great deal of the continent and much of the world beyond it, and each region has arrived at its own version independently. What makes it work is the contrast in texture rather than any complexity of flavour. The sugar sets to a hard, glassy shell around nuts that stay crisp inside it, so a piece shatters rather than chews. It is the kind of sweet that gets eaten by the handful without anyone deciding to, and it is made in slabs precisely because it is sold and eaten in that way: broken off, handed round, gone.

CameroonNympha

Klako, West African fritters of mashed ripe plantain seasoned with ginger and pepper, fried golden

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Klako, also written krakro, is a West African fritter made from mashed ripe plantain, and it is the plantain rather than the banana that matters. Ripe plantain has the sweetness and the starch to hold a fritter together; ordinary banana turns to liquid. The recipe here is savoury, seasoned with ginger, garlic, paprika and cayenne, which is the version most commonly eaten across Côte d'Ivoire, Togo and Ghana. That savoury treatment is worth stating clearly, because the sweet version is what most people expect from anything called a banana fritter. Both exist. Sweet versions with sugar, egg and milk are made across the region and across the Caribbean, and the two have travelled together, which is no accident: the same cooking crossed the Atlantic with enslaved West Africans, and Caribbean banana fritters are a direct relation rather than a coincidence. Plantain is abundant across the humid West African belt and very little of it is wasted. Fritters are one of several answers to fruit that has ripened past the point of frying in slices, alongside kelewele, the spiced fried plantain cubes of Ghana, and the many plantain and flour combinations across the region. They are made at home, sold at roadside stands, and eaten hot with the fingers, which is when they are at their best.

Côte d'Ivoire30 minCuisine228

Fried Yam

Fried yam is called dundun in Yoruba, and it is one of the most eaten street foods in Nigeria. Yam is peeled, cut into thick chips, salted and fried until the outside crisps and the inside stays soft and floury. It is sold from roadside stands with a pepper sauce, and it is eaten at breakfast, at lunch and late at night. Yam is the crop that Nigeria produces more of than anywhere else in the world, and dundun is the most direct thing to do with it. It costs almost nothing, needs three ingredients, and the frying takes minutes. That combination is what makes it street food: a vendor with a pot of oil and a sack of yam is in business. Its usual partner is akara, the fried bean cake, and the pairing of dundun and akara with a ground pepper sauce is a standard Nigerian breakfast. It is also eaten with egg sauce, with fried fish, with stew, or on its own. The word dundun covers the fried treatment specifically, as distinct from the plain, pounded and porridge treatments of the same tuber, each of which occupies its own place on the Nigerian table.

Nigeria35 minAnthonyJ

Cassava Fritters

Cassava fritters are grated cassava bound with a little flour, seasoned and shallow fried, and they are street food across a wide stretch of the world. The source names no country, and that is defensible here in a way it is not for most dishes: cassava fritters are made across West Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and Southeast Asia in closely related forms. Cassava itself is not African in origin. It came from South America and reached West Africa through Portuguese Atlantic trade from the sixteenth century, where it was adopted so completely that it is now the continent's second most important source of dietary energy. Nigeria grows more of it than any other country in the world. The texture is the point: crisp on the outside, chewy and slightly dense inside, quite unlike a potato fritter. That chewiness comes from cassava's starch behaving differently from potato's under heat. Gram flour binds it here, which is one option among several. The fibrous woody core running down the centre of each root has to come out, and so does the skin, which is thick and tough and needs a firm hand with a peeler.

50 minNympha

Dan Wake

Dan wake is a northern Nigerian dish of dumplings made from bean flour and kuka, the powdered leaf of the baobab tree. The name translates from Hausa as son of beans, and the dumplings cook in water until they float, then are drained and dressed with oil and spice, and eaten with a salad of raw vegetables and hard egg. Kuka is what colours it and what makes it northern. Baobab leaf powder is used across the Sahel as a thickener and a green vegetable, and its slightly mucilaginous quality helps bind the bean flour dough. Potash, kanwa, is the third component, a traditional alkaline salt used across West African cooking to soften and to alter texture, and it is what gives dan wake its particular chew. It is deliberately plain on its own. The dumplings carry almost no seasoning and rely entirely on what is put on them: yaji, the peanut based suya spice, fried oil, sliced onion, cabbage, tomato and cucumber, and often a sauce alongside. That construction, a neutral base plus an assertive dressing, is common across northern Nigerian street food and it is why dan wake is sold from stalls rather than mainly cooked at home.

Nigeria45 minNympha

Okpa

Okpa is a steamed pudding of Bambara nut flour and palm oil, wrapped and cooked in boiling water until it sets solid. It is the street food of Enugu, and anyone travelling into the city from Onitsha or Lagos will hear the sellers calling okpa di oku, meaning okpa is hot. Bambara groundnut is an indigenous African legume, grown long before peanuts arrived from South America, and it is the same nut behind several dishes across the continent. It is known as jugo beans in southern Africa, and okpa itself is also called igba and ntucha. The seeds come in small pods and are extremely hard, so hard that domestic grinders cannot handle them and only industrial mills will do the job. That is why okpa flour is bought rather than made. Restraint is the principle. Bambara nuts have a good flavour of their own, and the source is emphatic that adding onions and crayfish ruins it, which is unusual advice in Nigerian cooking where those two go into almost everything. Palm oil, salt, stock cubes and pepper are the whole seasoning. The mixture looks alarmingly watery when mixed, and that is correct. The ratio in the recipe gives the right texture, and using less water produces something rock hard.

Nigeria1 hr 25 minFoodChef

Akara

Akara is a fritter of peeled, ground beans, whipped until light and deep fried, and it is one of the most widely eaten breakfasts in West Africa. It is thought to have originated with the Yoruba of Nigeria and is now made across the region and beyond, under names including kosai in Hausa and akara in most of the rest. It crossed the Atlantic. Acarajé in Bahia, Brazil, is the same dish, carried there by enslaved West Africans, and it holds a sacred role in Candomblé as an offering as well as being sold as street food. That direction of travel is worth stating plainly, because the source has it backwards: the dish went from West Africa to Brazil, not the other way round. Two things make good akara. The beans must be peeled, which means soaking and rubbing the skins off, and the paste must be whipped hard enough to hold air, traditionally in a mortar with a pestle. That aeration is what makes akara light rather than dense, and it is why the mixture should be ground with as little water as possible, since a wet paste will not hold air. It is eaten with pap, agidi or bread, and Saturday morning is when Nigerian households most often make it.

Nigeria2 hr 20 minBeatrice

Grilled Plantains

Grilled plantain is street food across West Africa, and in Nigeria it is boli, ripe plantain roasted over charcoal until the outside blackens and the sugars inside caramelise. It is about as simple as cooking gets. No oil, no seasoning, nothing added. The plantain is put over heat and turned. What makes it work is entirely down to the fruit: a plantain that is ripe enough has developed sugars that caramelise under direct heat, and one that is not will taste starchy and dull no matter how long it is grilled. Plantains are not bananas, despite the resemblance. They are larger, starchier, and must be cooked before eating, raw they are unpleasant and hard to digest. The ripeness scale runs from green, which is firm and starchy and used for chips and fufu, through yellow, which is what grilling wants, to almost black, which is very sweet and better fried. Boli is sold from charcoal drums at roadsides and motor parks, usually with roasted groundnuts, and often with a pepper sauce or with fish. The pairing with groundnuts is close to fixed in Nigeria, the salt and fat against the sweetness of the plantain. It is cheap, filling and energy-dense, which is why it has stayed street food rather than becoming restaurant food.

NigeriaDebby

Kelewele

Kelewele is Ghanaian spiced fried plantain: ripe plantain cut into cubes, tossed in a paste of ginger, chilli, garlic and spices, rested, then fried until the outside crisps and the inside stays soft. It is one of the country's best known street foods and is sold from stalls in the evening across Accra. The spicing is what distinguishes it, and it is worth being clear about this because the source is not. **Kelewele is not the same as aloco.** Aloco is the Ivorian name for plain fried ripe plantain, salted and nothing more, and the same dish is dodo in Nigeria and makemba in the Congo. Kelewele is marinated first, and the ginger and chilli are the entire reason it has its own name. Ginger, hot pepper and salt are the base, and nutmeg, garlic, onion and lemon appear in most versions. The rest matters: ten to twenty minutes lets the spice paste get into the cut faces of the plantain rather than sitting on the surface. It is eaten on its own, with roasted peanuts, or alongside rice and bean dishes, and it is sometimes described as vegetarian meat for the substance it lends a plate. Traditionally it is fried in red palm oil.

Ghana35 minDeborah

Tatale

Tatale is the Ghanaian plantain pancake, made from plantains so ripe their skins have blackened, mashed with onion, ginger and pepper, bound with corn flour and fried in spoonfuls. It is street food and a side dish, and it is sometimes called the golden pancake for its colour. It exists because of thrift. Overripe plantain is too soft to fry as slices and too sweet to use as a starch, and tatale is what was worked out to use it. That origin is common to a great many good dishes and it is worth stating rather than glossing over. Its traditional partner is aboboi, the Bambara bean stew, and the two are eaten together as a complete meal across Ghana. It is also served warm as an appetizer with beans in various forms. It is eaten in Nigeria as well. The source claims a link between the dish and Tatale, a district in northern Ghana. That district exists, but the connection to the dish is not something the record supports, and it is flagged rather than repeated as fact.

Ghana1 hr 5 minFoodChef

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.

GhanaFoodChef

South African vetkoek, deep-fried bread rolls, split and served warm

Vetkoek (South African Fried Bread)

Vetkoek is a yeasted dough, flattened by hand and deep-fried until it is crisp outside and soft as bread inside. The Afrikaans name translates literally as fat cake, and the isiZulu and isiXhosa name is amagwinya. It is one of the most widely eaten things in South Africa. Its lineage is Dutch. Fried yeast dough came to the Cape with Dutch settlers, and vetkoek belongs to the same broad family as the Dutch oliebol, the Caribbean johnnycake and Mexican sopaipillas. What happened to it afterwards is what makes it South African: it became township food and street food, sold from stalls and windows across the country, and its usual filling, curried beef mince, is itself a product of the Cape's Indian and Cape Malay influence. It is eaten both ways round. Split and stuffed with curried mince, cheese, polony, tinned fish or slaw, it is lunch. Split and spread with syrup, honey or jam, it is a sweet snack with tea. Neither version is more authentic than the other. Note that this page covers plain vetkoek. The filled version with beef mince curry has a separate page on this site, and the two are meant to complement rather than replace each other.

South Africa45 minFoodChef

Accra banana, Cameroonian fritters of banana and grated cassava, fried golden

Accra Banana (Cameroonian Banana and Cassava Fritters)

Overripe bananas mashed with grated cassava, seasoned with salt and deep-fried into small golden balls. In Cameroon it is street food sold nationwide, and it is also celebration food, a fixture at Christmas parties and weddings. What sets it apart from the many other West African banana fritters is the starch. Most versions bind mashed banana with wheat flour, rice flour or cornmeal; this one uses grated cassava, which is why it is also called accra cassava. Cassava is worked into an enormous number of forms in Cameroonian cooking, fufu, garri, bobolo sticks, and this is one more. The result is chewier and denser than a flour-based fritter, with the cassava's faint sourness cutting the sweetness of the fruit. Overripe bananas are not a compromise here, they are the requirement. A firm banana has neither the sweetness nor the softness the mixture needs, and the dish exists partly as a way of using fruit that has gone too far to eat out of hand. The usual accompaniment is African pepper sauce, which is worth taking seriously: the contrast between a sweet fried fritter and a fierce chilli sauce is the whole point of eating them together.

Cameroon45 minBlessing

Bessara (Moroccan Fava Bean Purée)

Bessara is dried split fava beans cooked soft with garlic and olive oil, then puréed and seasoned with cumin and paprika. It is street food across Morocco, most strongly associated with the north, and it is eaten for breakfast as often as for anything else. Its consistency is not fixed, and that is a feature rather than a vagueness. Made thick, it is a dip eaten from a shared plate with Moroccan bread. Made looser, it is a soup served in individual bowls, which is how street vendors serve it on cold mornings. The same pot produces both, depending on how much of the cooking liquid goes back in. Traditionally the beans were cooked for hours until they collapsed entirely and then passed through a food mill. A blender does the same job in seconds and gives a smoother result, which is what most cooks now use, and the source is right that nothing is lost by it. The condiments are not optional garnish. Bessara is served with olive oil, cumin, salt and cayenne or harissa on the side, and each person seasons their own bowl. The purée itself is deliberately mild, which only makes sense once you know that. Note that the same dish appears elsewhere spelt bissara; they are one thing. Some cooks make it with dried split peas in place of some or all of the fava beans, which gives a lighter texture and a greener colour but changes nothing about the method or the seasoning.

Morocco1 hr 30 minDeborah

Egyptian Koshari

Koshari is Egypt's national dish and its most famous street food, rice, lentils and macaroni layered together, topped with a spiced tomato sauce, crisp fried onions and a sharp garlic-vinegar dressing. It is a dish of components, and none of them is complicated. What makes koshari work is that all of them are made separately and assembled at the end, so each keeps its own texture: the rice and lentils soft, the pasta firm, the onions properly crisp, the sauce sharp with vinegar and cumin. It is cheap, filling and entirely plant-based as standard, which is why it feeds an enormous number of people every day. Koshari shops exist across Egypt doing nothing else, and it is eaten as often at home. Its ubiquity is genuine, the comparison to macaroni cheese in the source is about how ordinary it is rather than what it tastes like. The daqqa, the garlic and vinegar dressing, is what stops the whole thing being stodgy, and it is the element most often underdone by people making it for the first time. Be generous with it. Chickpeas are usually added on top.

Egypt41 minBlessing

Halabessa, Egyptian chickpea soup served hot in a glass

Halabessa (Egyptian Chickpea Drink)

Halabessa is chickpeas cooked in a spiced tomato broth and served hot in a glass, with a spoon for the chickpeas and a straw for the liquid. It is Egyptian winter street food, and the way it is served is the most interesting thing about it. Nothing else is quite drunk this way. Halabessa occupies a category between a soup and a drink, it is sold from kiosks along the Nile and the Mediterranean corniche, in cafés and clubs, and the glass with both spoon and straw is standard rather than a novelty. It is also called hummus el-sham, which translates roughly as Levantine chickpeas. The setting matters to how it is understood in Egypt. The kiosks are strung with coloured lights, they play classic Egyptian music, and halabessa is what you drink standing by the water on a cold night. The source is right that eating it is as much about the occasion as the food. The broth is what carries it: bouillon, grated tomato, garlic, cumin and pepper, sharpened with lemon at the end and served with extra lemon and chilli on the side. Dried chickpeas soaked overnight are not optional, tinned ones give you no broth, and the broth is half the drink. The source's brand-specific bouillon note has been generalised.

Egypt3 hr 40 minBlessing

Vegan suya, oyster mushrooms grilled and tossed in Nigerian suya spice

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.

Nigeria30 minduchessnena

Zalabya, small Egyptian doughnuts dipped in syrup and dusted with cinnamon

Zalabya (Egyptian Syrup Doughnuts)

Zalabya are small round balls of yeasted batter, deep-fried until crisp and dipped briefly in cold sugar syrup. They are Egyptian street food, sold from kiosks all over the country for very little, and they are eaten most of all during Ramadan. The source's description is the best one: think of them as the round part that is missing from a doughnut. They are crunchy outside and light and airy inside, and the syrup is absorbed only into the outer layer, so biting into one gives a burst of sweetness against a plain interior rather than sweetness all the way through. The names travel. Loukoumades in Greece, lokma in Turkey, zalabya or zalabia in Egypt, and loqmet al-qadi, the judge's bite, across the Arabic-speaking world. Versions are eaten all around the Mediterranean and into South Asia, where jalebi is a related but differently shaped relative. The batter is very wet, closer to a thick pouring batter than a dough, and that is what makes them light. It is dropped by the spoonful straight into the oil rather than shaped. The syrup should be cool when the hot balls go in, for the same reason as koeksisters: the temperature difference draws it in. The source's ingredient list has run its headings into the list and one water quantity is malformed.

Egypt1 hr 55 minBlessing

Recettes

Grilled Plantains

Akara

Zalabya (Egyptian Syrup Doughnuts)

Vegan Suya (Spiced Grilled Mushrooms)

Cassava Fritters

Fried Yam

Kenkey

Tapalapa

Djablani

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Tapalapa

Kenkey

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Djablani

Groundnut Sweet

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Fried Yam

Cassava Fritters

Dan Wake

Okpa

Akara

Grilled Plantains

Kelewele

Tatale

Red-Red Stew

Vetkoek (South African Fried Bread)

Accra Banana (Cameroonian Banana and Cassava Fritters)

Bessara (Moroccan Fava Bean Purée)

Egyptian Koshari

Halabessa (Egyptian Chickpea Drink)

Vegan Suya (Spiced Grilled Mushrooms)

Zalabya (Egyptian Syrup Doughnuts)

Recettes

Recettes à la une

Grilled Plantains

Cassava Fritters

Fried Yam

Kenkey

Tapalapa

Djablani

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Tapalapa

Kenkey

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Djablani

Groundnut Sweet

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Fried Yam

Cassava Fritters

Dan Wake

Okpa

Akara

Grilled Plantains

Kelewele

Tatale

Red-Red Stew

Vetkoek (South African Fried Bread)

Accra Banana (Cameroonian Banana and Cassava Fritters)

Bessara (Moroccan Fava Bean Purée)

Egyptian Koshari

Halabessa (Egyptian Chickpea Drink)

Vegan Suya (Spiced Grilled Mushrooms)

Zalabya (Egyptian Syrup Doughnuts)