Food Pt I - The Starch

Right its finally here, the often promised and never delivered blog on the Nigerian culinary extravaganza. This will be divided into two parts, this part is an homage to starch. Ask for what food is available in a Nigerian restaurant (or chop house in the local parlance) and you will be given a list of the available starch, no further explanation is necessary.

Typical beside the road 'chop house'

There are many places which serve Nigerian cuisine, they range from upmarket air-conditioned restaurants which remind me of a kind of bling version of McDonalds to a lady by the side of the road with a cool box. Price is normally inversely proportional to tastiness and directly proportional to the probability of bowel problems in the hours afterwards. I think this is mainly due to turnover, the women with coolers normally have to sell out within an hour or two of opening up, whereas at a proper restaurant the food can sit there for days and still be re-heated by enthusiastic if olfactory ly challenged staff.

One other thing to note about Nigerian food is the temperature, even breakfast here is served with ground dried hot peppers (called peppe) up north the amount of peppe added to food is manageable (for someone who like madras), but every so often you get a land mine which can blow your mouth off. Like many things in Nigeria food is something that should be approached with caution and the ground either carefully prodded first or follow in someone else’s footprints to avoid nasty surprises.


Following on from the format of the wildly successful drinks post I give you…. Starch:

Pounded yam

Pounded yam:

The undisputed king of the Nigerian starch based hierarchy, ask any Nigerian their favorite food (a more common question than you would have thought) and the answer for ALL men and most women is pounded yam. All households have somewhere a yam pounding mortar and pestle (a novel use of such a device to prop up a car is provided for illustration purposes only). To prepare your yam you must get dry yam (new rainy season yam is too wet apparently) boil it (err.. .didn’t you just say it had to be dry???), once soft you just wack it in your novelty giant mortar and pestle and pound away to your hearts content.

Most of the time no knife or forks will be provided and the accompanying soup or stew (for soup read stew and the stew is more like a spicy tomatoes soup) is eaten by rolling the yam into balls/shovel shapes then scooping the stew up with the resulting sculpture.




Other lump based starch:
Semovita - yellowy lump based starch made from corn flour at a guess.
Gari  - Like pounded yam but sticks to your fingers more, less flavour too.
tuwo schincafa (Stirred rice) - Rice but beaten to a pulp, then formed into balls. Its pretty good actually and most importantly is the only way to consume rice if you don’t want to also consume half a gallon of palm oil.

Yam Porridge
This is my favorite kind of starch, amazing considering its not normally served with meat. Its boiled yam which has been fluffed a little bit with a stew of beans and served with spicy palm oil based sauce. Looks disgusting, tastes great and a huge plate is only 30p

Jallof rice
This is a Nigerian staple, the wikipedia article for Jallof rice sums up the dish quite nicely:
“The most common basic ingredients are: rice, tomatoes and tomato paste, onion, salt, and red pepper. Beyond that, nearly any kind of meat, vegetable, or spice can be added.”

You can safely omit “nearly” before “any kind of meat”.

Also they have omitted one major ingredient, palm oil, lots of it. Rice here is not complete until it’s been thoroughly greased up.

Any form of rice must be cooked on an industrial scale in giant comedy caldrons, which do have the effect of making any group of women chefs look like the coven of witches who decided that black was so last year and floral oranges were a better summer look.





 


Street Food

Kosee
In all parts of Kaduna you can buy deep fried bean cakes on the side of the road, these have the advantages of being cheap and pretty much safe (nothing survives boiling oil) but you do have to start your day with deep fried food and pepe

Moi-Moi
These are similar to kosee except the bean cakes are boiled rather than fried, also for some bizarre reason certain evil people stuff crayfish in the mix so the whole thing tastes and looks like boiled vomit.

Corn
From March to August you can get bbqed sweet corn, which is similar but dryer and tougher than western sweet corn. Like many shops in Nigeria they tend to clump into groups so that at some roadsides you will see 4 or 5 women in a row, proving there is comfort in numbers, if perhaps not profit.

Also available are fried yam, sweet potatoe etc etc, if you can put it in oil and it contains starch you can more or less buy it on the streets of nigeria.


Right that’s It for now I leave you with a cute picture of the kitten and some video of an idiot being forced to dance for the Hausa people… who ever he is he didn’t get to keep any of the money and is very angry about this.