African Recipes

⏱ Prep: 10 min 🔥Cook: 20 min 👤Serves: 4🌿Vegan Tanzanian Collard Greens or Sukuma wiki means “push the week” or “stretch the week” in Swahili, a reference to its role as the everyday vegetable dish that extends meals and makes food go further across Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Collard greens, known in Swahili simply as sukuma, cooked dry with onions, tomatoes, garlic and a bouillon cube until tender and deeply savoury. No water needed beyond what the tomatoes provide. The finished dish should be dry, not saucy, which concentrates every bit of flavour into the greens themselves. It is one …

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⏱ Prep: 10 min 🔥Cook: 30 min 👤Serves: 4🌿Vegan Tikil gomen is Ethiopian cabbage stew, green cabbage, potatoes and carrots cooked slowly together with turmeric, cumin and ginger in a covered pot until the vegetables are velvety tender and the turmeric has turned everything a vivid golden yellow. It is one of the most popular dishes on an Ethiopian vegetarian platter, sitting alongside lentil stews and spiced greens on a sheet of injera. Unassuming to look at. Deeply satisfying to eat. The technique is patient cooking, not complex technique. Spices bloomed in oil, onions softened until sweet, vegetables added and …

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⏱ Active: 20 min ❄️Set: 20 min 🍬Makes: 20–24 pieces 🌍Tanzanian / Swahili 🌿Vegan Tanzanian peanut brittle (Kashata za njugu), roasted peanuts and dried coconut set in cardamom-spiced caramel, broken into irregular pieces and sold by street vendors across Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya wrapped in paper. It is one of the great East African street food sweets: crunchy, sweet, slightly aromatic from the cardamom, with the deep nuttiness of roasted peanuts and the chew of toasted coconut all at once. Made in 20 minutes with four main ingredients. The technique is straightforward caramel-making with two specific rules. Stir the sugar …

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⏱ Prep: 25 min ❄️Chill: 1 hr 👤Serves: 8–10 🌿Vegetarian Nigerian vegetable salad is the party salad, the cold, creamy, colourful bowl that sits beside the jollof rice and fried rice at every Nigerian celebration, birthday, wedding and Sunday gathering. Shredded cabbage and lettuce, grated carrot, deseeded cucumber and tomato, canned baked beans, sweetcorn and hard-boiled eggs layered by colour in a large bowl and dressed with salad cream, a sweet, tangy British-origin dressing that has been beloved in Nigerian households for generations. It is served cold, always. The dressing goes on at the last minute or at the table …

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⏱ Prep: 20 min 🌡️Rest: 45 min 🔥Cook: 20 min 🫓Makes: 8 🌍East African East African chapati is not the same as Indian chapati. They share a name and a broad ancestry, chapati came to East Africa through Indian traders and labourers who built the region’s railway networks in the 19th century but they became different breads. Kenyan chapati uses plain flour rather than whole wheat, oil in the dough rather than dry, a pinch of sugar, and most importantly, the coil method: each disc of dough is oiled, rolled into a rope, coiled into a spiral and rested before …

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⏱ Prep: 20 min 🔥Cook: 50 min 👤Serves: 4 Origin: Ethiopia Ethiopian berbere chicken curry is chicken thighs simmered in a sauce built on two things: berbere, the complex, heat-forward spice blend at the centre of Ethiopian cooking and deeply caramelised onions cooked in niter kibbeh, the spiced clarified butter that gives Ethiopian stews their characteristic depth. It is warming, deeply coloured, richly spiced, and significantly better the next day. The berbere does not go into a pot of liquid and simmer, it goes into hot fat first, bloomed for a minute until the kitchen fills with the smell of …

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⏱ Prep: 20 min 🔥Cook: 20 min 🍬Makes: 20–25 pieces 🌿Vegan Nigerian coconut candy is fresh coconut and sugar cooked together until the sugar caramelises and the whole thing sets into a sweet, golden, slightly chewy, or fully crunchy candy. Three ingredients. Sold at markets, roadside stalls and school gates across Nigeria, wrapped in paper or plastic, disappearing within seconds of being made. The technique is pure caramel science: sugar must reach caramelisation before the mixture is pulled from the heat. Too early and the candy never hardens, it stays sticky and soft. Too late and it burns bitter. The …

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⏱ Prep: 30 min 🔥Cook: 20 min 🍕Makes: 4 🌍Origin: Zanzibar, Tanzania Zanzibar pizza is not pizza. It is a thin disc of dough stretched directly on a hot oiled pan, an egg cracked and spread across the raw surface, a spiced meat filling spooned on, all four sides folded inward to make a square parcel, then fried on both sides until golden and crispy. It is the signature street food of Forodhani Gardens Night Market in Stone Town, sold by vendors for a dollar or two, cut into squares, eaten standing up by the waterfront. It is closer to …

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⏱ Prep: 15 min 🔥Cook: 40 min 👤Serves: 6 🌍West African This instant pot African lamb stew uses the West African method of building a stew on a blended tomato-pepper base, fresh tomatoes, red bell pepper, scotch bonnet and garlic blended smooth, then cooked down with aromatics and spices before the lamb is pressure cooked until completely tender. What would take two hours on the stovetop takes 25 minutes under pressure. Lamb shoulder is the right cut, the connective tissue converts to rich gelatin under pressure, thickening the sauce naturally. The result is a deep, savoury, slightly spiced stew that …

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⏱ Prep: 15 min 🔥Cook: 5 min 👤Serves: 4–6 🌿Vegan Moroccan carrot and chickpea salad is the combination of two Moroccan pantry staples, raw or lightly cooked carrots and tinned chickpeas in a dressing built on cumin, harissa, lemon and honey. It is the sweet-spiced-sour balance that runs through all Moroccan cooking, in salad form. Ready in twenty minutes, better after thirty as the dressing soaks in. The dressing is the dish. Toast the cumin seeds whole and grind them yourself if you have five extra minutes, the difference from pre-ground cumin is immediate and worth the effort. Harissa brings …

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