West African · Soup
Egusi Soup
- Intermediate
- 70 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a silken, spoon-slow texture, real fire that builds and stays, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 200g ground egusi (melon seeds)
- 500g assorted meat/stockfish/tripe, or beef chunks
- 3 tbsp palm oil
- Blended pepper mix: tomato, red bell, scotch bonnet, onion
- 2 big handfuls spinach or bitterleaf; crayfish powder, stock
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: fish · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer meats seasoned until tender; keep the stock.
- Fry pepper mix in palm oil; mix egusi with a little water into a paste.
- Add egusi in clumps; let them set 10 min before breaking into curds. 10 min
- Loosen with stock, return meat, wilt in the greens. Serve with pounded yam or fufu.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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