West African Lamb Ragoût - Mafé
I’ve been developing a genuine interest in West African food recently.
African food overall is fascinating, but of all the regions of African cuisine, West African food is generally under-represented in restaurant cuisines, certainly in Western countries. You find North African restaurants fairly regularly. Ethiopian cuisine has become pretty popular in the last ten years. But West African food? It’s still pretty rare.
West Africa consists of sixteen countries; Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. And the cuisines of these countries are more similar to each other, than to the other cuisines of Africa. They eat chicken or guinea fowl, fish, shellfish, and some beef, goat, and lamb. They also use a lot of chillies, coconut milk, coconut oil, dried beans, ginger, maize (sweet corn), onions, peanuts, pepper, red lentils, and tomatoes, with banku, fufu, or rice.
NB. Banku is fermented mashed maize and cassava, while fufu is fermented mashed yam, plantain, or cassava. These are served in small balls and eaten by hand, dipped into soup or ragout. Recipes for these dishes are easily found on the Internet.
But this ragoût is delightful! It’s creamy and rich at the same time, very peanut-flavoured, with a complex chilli-tomato-peanut-coconut-meat taste.
Mafé
Ingredients
* 3 medium onions, 6 cloves of garlic, 3cm ginger, 4 carrots, 2 fresh jalapenos, 1 bunch coriander.
* Canola or coconut oil, 500g stewing lamb or beef, salt, black pepper, chilli powder, paprika.
* 2 tbsp tomato paste, 400g tin chopped tomato, 400g tin coconut cream, chicken stock, 1 cup peanut paste.
First, do all of your cutting and prep. Peel the onions, slice them into thin petals, and put them aside in a bowl. Peel the garlic and ginger, grate them both together, and put them aside with the onion. Trim the chillis, slice them thinly, and put them aside with the onion, garlic and ginger. Peel the carrots, top and tail them, cut them into medium-sized chunks, and put them aside in a bowl, by themselves. Wash the coriander and pick all the leaves off the stems. Discard the stems, and put the leaves aside in a bowl by themselves.
Heat a couple of tablespoons of the oil in a large heavy stewpan over a medium to high flame. Add the lamb, sprinkle it with a good few pinches of salt, black pepper, chilli powder, and paprika, and sauté it until it is lightly browned on all sides. Remove the lamb and set it aside.
Add the onion to the oil in the pot and sauté it until it is translucent. Stir in the garlic, ginger, and chilli, and sauté the mixture for another few minutes.
Return the lamb to the stewpan, stir in the tomato paste and peanut paste and cook the mixture for a few minutes. Stir in the tinned tomatoes and bring the mixture to a low boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and reduce the mixture for about twenty minutes.
Transfer the mixture to a slow-cooker, add enough of the stock to make the dish look ‘stew-like’ and season the dish with some salt and pepper. Slow-cook the mixture until the lamb is tender and oil starts to rise to the surface of the dish. Add more stock as it cooks, if it looks necessary, to keep the dish wet enough.
Add half the green coriander, adjust the seasonings and serve the mafé with rice or couscous and some more chopped green coriander.
Serves six to eight
A West African dish, particularly popular in Senegal, Gambia, Mali and the Côte d’Ivoire. But let me tell you a couple of things. First off, you can use pre-cooked meat in this recipe, Just make the sauce and stir in 500g of roasted or slow-cooked beef or lamb and simmer it, very gently, for half an hour. Also, if you make this dish without the meat, with some extra stock and coconut milk, you get Burundi’s national dish; Groundnut Soup. Also, you can use peanut butter for this dish, but it is better if you use 100% ground peanut paste. You can find it in wholefood shops or health food shops.
