Accara

Name: Accara
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: Senegalese
Ingredients: 500 g Dried black-eyed beans; 1 Onion, roughly chopped; 1 Scotch bonnet or other hot chilli; 2 tsp Salt; 80 ml Cold water for whipping; 1.5 L Oil for deep frying; 4 Tomatoes for the sauce; 1 Onion for the sauce, sliced; 2 Chilli for the sauce; 2 tbsp Oil for the sauce; 3 Baguettes to serve

Black-eyed beans skinned, ground to a paste and whipped until they float, then spooned into hot oil — Dakar's breakfast fritter, split into a baguette with chilli sauce.

Fuente

Receta de Senegalese home kitchens · 🏺 Tradicional · Everyday Senegalese cooking — the one-pot rice-and-fish table of Dakar and the coast, built on onions, lemon, chilli and groundnuts.

Senegalese · breakfast fritter — An ownerless traditional dish, so no cook is credited. The cited article confirms the cowpea/bean fritter form and records the dish's Yoruba origin and its spread across West Africa — it is not a Senegal-only article, and that is said here rather than glossed over. Quantities, the skinning routine and the float test are this book's own.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

Watch it being made · 3 videos

eatahfood Aji'sSimplecooking Chef Lola's Kitchen

⏱ 90 min🍽 6 porciones🔥 280 kcal🇸🇳 Senegal🌶️🌶️

HalalVeganoVegetarianoSin glutenSin lácteosSin frutos secos

Pasos

Soak the beans in cold water for 1 hour, then rub them between your palms in the water so the skins float off. Pour the skins away and repeat until the beans are white.
💡 Every skin has to go. One batch left un-skinned gives grey, heavy fritters that never puff — this is the whole difficulty of accara.
Grind the skinned beans with the onion and chilli to a thick, smooth paste, using as little water as possible.
Beat the paste hard with a wooden spoon for 8 minutes, adding the cold water a spoonful at a time. It should turn pale and grow.
💡 Test it: drop half a teaspoon into a glass of water. If it floats, it is ready. If it sinks, beat it another 3 minutes.
Stir in the salt only at the very end, then heat the oil to 170°C.
Drop in heaped teaspoons of the batter, 6 at a time, and fry 4 minutes until deep gold and hollow-sounding.
Fry the sauce tomatoes, onion and chilli in the sauce oil for 15 minutes and blend. Split a baguette, fill it with accara and spoon the sauce in.

💡 Consejos

Salt too early stops the paste holding air. Add it in the last thirty seconds of beating, not before.
The float test is not folklore — it is a real density check, and batter that fails it will never puff in the oil.
Accara is eaten across West Africa under different names. The Senegalese version is the one in a baguette, a habit left by the French.