Senegalese · Sauce
Nokoss
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 3 onions (450 g), roughly chopped
- 1 whole head of garlic, cloves peeled
- 40 g flat parsley, thick stalks included
- 2 scotch bonnets, stalks removed
- 20 g netetou (fermented locust bean)
- 1 tbsp black peppercorns
- 10 g salt
- 80 ml groundnut oil
Equipment
Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
FermentationDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsMashing & puréeing
Allergen screen
Found: peanuts
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
- Toast the netetou in a dry pan over low heat, shaking, until the sharp ammoniacal smell gives way to something malty and the beans darken a shade.
- In a mortar, crush the peppercorns to a coarse grit first, then work in the netetou, then the garlic and chillies with the salt as an abrasive.
- Add the parsley and pound until it is bruised into the paste, then the onion last, working only until it breaks down and no further.
- Pack into a jar, level the surface and pour the oil over so it seals the paste from the air. Keep cold and spoon out with a dry spoon.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
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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