Nigerian · Sauce
Obe Ata Din Din
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with real fire that builds and stays.
Ingredients
- 600 g plum tomatoes, cored
- 300 g red tatashe peppers, deseeded
- 60 g red scotch bonnet, about six, stems pulled
- 250 g red onion, half for blending and half sliced
- 250 ml groundnut oil
- 2 vegetable seasoning cubes, crushed
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- 10 g salt
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceFrying the paste until the oil splits
The words inside
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
- Blend the tomatoes, tatashe, scotch bonnet and half the onion coarse rather than smooth, so the finished sauce keeps some grain.
- Boil the blend in a wide uncovered pot until it has lost half its volume and a spoon dragged across the base leaves a track that fills back slowly.
- Heat the oil in a second pot and fry the sliced onion until the edges brown.
- Tip in the reduced puree and fry over medium heat, stirring every couple of minutes, until it darkens from orange scarlet to deep brick and clear oil pools at the sides.
- Stir in the seasoning cubes, thyme and salt, cook two minutes more, then leave off the heat to settle so the oil rises in a sheet.
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.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
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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