Seven African inspired dishes to tingle the taste buds

Africa is the second biggest and most populous continent in the world. It’s made up of 54 countries, which are all home to a plethora of localised and regional cuisines.

Zoe Adjonyoh, restaurateur at Zoe's Ghana Kitchen and author of a cookbook with the same name, has been, in her own words, ‘on a bit of a mission for the last eight years or so, to spread some love and familiarity for food from across Africa.’ In The Food Programme: African Food, she meets other British chefs and cooks exploring their African heritage through food and tastes some of their favourite dishes.

Zoe meets Nima Owino in Mile End, East London, to sample some Sierra Leonean breakfast food. Nima runs Cham Cham Supper Club, which focuses on Sierra Leonean and Liberian food. The term cham cham, Nima says, basically means small bites to eat.

Nima serves Zoe banana akara – traditional banana fritters from Sierra Leone – which she makes using "really, really, really ripe bananas, nutmeg, ground rice, rice flour and sugar." The akara is then "teamed with hot pepper sauce." Try going bananas for akara!

Nima produces a second dish called binch: Binch is basically black eyes peas, onions, stewed slowly with some sustainable palm oil.

Nima explains how "in its literal sense binch basically just means beans" but she strongly recommends serving the dish with a poached egg, because the soft yolk running into the sauce is "amazing". Sounds pretty egg-cellent to us.

Nima states, "we actually use a lot of peanuts in a lot of our dishes." One of her most popular offerings is pepper chicken. This is "with peanuts… it’s lemon juice, garlic, tomato paste and tomatoes and basically chicken’s marinated in this sauce and then… it’s basically barbecued."

The cook teams her pepper chicken with jacato baba ganoush. Jacato is often known as African aubergine and it is white, with a green hue, and shaped like an egg. Nima admits that people always want to know why baba ganoush, a traditionally Levantine dish, appears on a Sierra Leonean menu and she says the reason is that a lot of her cousins are Lebanese Sierra Leoneans: "we actually have a lot of dishes that we make because of that Lebanese influence."

Zoe meets Lloyd Mensah, the owner of Spinach & Agushi Supper Club, which appears at various markets around London.

Photo taken by Lloyd Mensah

He and his wife started their Ghanaian-inspired food business because they could never find any kind of restaurants serving food from Ghana or Nigeria that were catering to people outside of their community.

Lloyd talks Zoe through a series of stews on offer, including a beef stew with green bell peppers and chicken groundnut stew – but their signature dish is a stew called spinach and agushi, which is spinach with crushed melon seed and mushroom.

5. Xawaash

Fozia Ismail lives in Bristol, where she runs Arawelo Eats, a series of supper clubs inspired by her Somali heritage.

Fozia describes Somali food as almost in between Middle Eastern and Indian cooking and says how central to Somali cuisine is a spice mix called xawaash (pronounced hawash), which means the "essentials."

She says it tends to be "coriander seed, cumin… cardamom, cinnamon… black pepper, turmeric and cloves." It can be added to meats, stews or soups to pack a powerful flavour punch.

Zoe chats to Jeremy and Iré of Ikoyi, who she says are pushing the boundaries of West African food and ingredients to the next level in their central London restaurant – the "first fine dining restaurant in London that celebrates West African food and flavours."

Jeremy, the co-founder and chef describes one of their experimental deserts: a mango parfait inspired by what a credit card’ll look like in the future, wrapped in bondage straps. But all the ingredients that are in it are authentically West African.

The pair do some interesting things with drinks too. Jeremy talks Zoe through the process of making one of their flagship cocktails, the Roast Plantain Old Fashioned: "We’re weighing out some plantain, which we’re gonna caramalise with butter and miso. So you get the crystal clear rum with the, um, texture of butter and, er, roasted miso and plaintain." Bottoms up!

Frances and Abdel Boukraa have been running Adam’s Café in West London for thirty years. A café by day, the space is transformed into a Tunisian and Moroccan restaurant at night.

Zoe samples brik à l'oeuf, a Tunisian Street food, which Frances describes as "the lightest, crispiest filo pastry… surrounding a soft egg with herbs inside." You can eat it with a little salt and a little lemon.