Nigerian Pepper Soup Recipe

Pepper soup―a comforting Nigerian soup seasoned with a spice mix and clean lemongrass―is well-known 12 months-spherical, savored across the state and served by road food stuff suppliers in bars and restaurants from the wet time (March to November) to harmattan (November to March), the dry season that begins with dust-laden winds blowing about the state from the Sahara. The name is a misnomer mainly because the soup is just not always outlined by a pepper-forward taste profile―the flavors are substantially much more advanced, with nutty, bitter, woodsy, and floral notes, as perfectly as heat. 

This one-pot dish marries a deeply-flavored broth with a protein. For meat, it is common to use rooster (stewing hens, alternatively of broilers, are most popular for their fuller taste), goat, or cow’s foot, alongside with an assortment of offal, these types of as tripe, intestines, liver, and kidney. As for seafood, you will see versions manufactured with tilapia, catfish, croaker, snapper, or dried fish. There are destinations that even present ‘point-and-kill’ selection, where you can find dwell catfish from a tank and have it be organized to order―whole, cut into chunks, head incorporated or eliminated, with herbs, and with various spice stages, in accordance to your preferences. And then you can find party pepper soup, frequently built with a mix of meat and offal, which is normally served as the very first program at Nigerian parties. 

The broth is seasoned with a mix of usually two or far more indigenous spices (full, crushed, or finely ground), like erhe (calabash nutmeg), urheri/uda (grains of Selim), alligator pepper (grains of paradise), umilo (cocoplum), and gbafilo (rough-skinned plum). As soon as you have resolved on your protein, it can be simply a subject of combining it with the spice mix, h2o, and herbs like lemongrass leaves, which are utilized as medication and foods in Nigeria, integrated into tonics, tea, broths). Growing up, my mum frequently included lime leaves (not a frequent addition but just one that pairs nicely). Other folks like to increase some heft to their broth by incorporating tomatoes, onions, and contemporary chiles. To finish, it is prevalent to incorporate some shredded scent leaf (Ocimum gratissimum), an herb which is related to mint and basil. 

My favored variation of pepper soup is from the Niger Delta area in southern coastal Nigeria, which is distinguished by the fact that it makes use of much more spices in its spice mix. When I was a kid, my mum and grandma produced many variations of it, together with a thick, creamy soup named ukodo, in which yams and/or unripe plantains are cooked specifically in the broth seasoned with akaun (a native alkaline rock salt that contributes a a little bit mineral and earthy essence). As the veggies cook, they soften, yielding a pepper soup with a thicker, sauce-like regularity.

For the model beneath, which is made with hen and influenced by my mum and grandmother, I begin by mixing, toasting, and grinding spices―nutty erhe, smoky and musky urheri, aromatic and spicy alligator pepper with notes of ginger, pepper and cardamom, and nutty-tasting umilo and gbafilo―to generate a deeply-flavored, whole-bodied blend. After that’s accomplished, I combine the rooster, floor crayfish (a powder created from smoked and/or dried shrimp and prawns acknowledged regionally as crayfish), lemongrass leaves (I use stalks of lemongrass when I can’t come across the tall, slender leaves), and the spice blend, together with drinking water, in a pot. As shortly as the rooster is tender, I complete it with lime leaves and time with Nigerian dry pepper (you can use cayenne if you have it) and salt.

You can engage in all around with the proteins. If you might be utilizing tender chicken (broilers), fish, or prawns and other seafood that consider fewer time to cook dinner, I advocate cooking the soup very low and slow and also adding bones or shells to the pot to create and focus the taste. For seafood variations, I like to use prawn or shrimp stock rather of drinking water. When the taste has made, I pressure out the bones or shells, add the seafood, and simmer until eventually cooked. 

At home, I adore serving pepper soup with evenly salted boiled yam, just-ripe plantains, and lashings of thick, unrefined purple palm oil―I very advise you do the exact.