Top 10 most popular Senegalese dishes

Ahh it's still a little long, I didn't write a top 10! The last series of top 10 that I wrote was about the Ivorian food. This time it is direction Senegal . I will present you the 10 most popular dishes in the country of Teranga

I must admit that Senegal is a country that really fascinates me in the culinary field or in other areas. Senegal is one of the few countries in French -speaking Africa which has exported its international culinary heritage.

The Thieboudian, a Senegalese dish was inscribed in December 2021 at UNESCO as the intangible cultural heritage of humanity . Do you realize? It is still a pride 😌

Let's start with the top 10 most popular senegalese dishes: 

I don't know about you, but I love the fact that the Senegalese have kept their culture and tradition in a certain way. It is their way of eating together that I appreciate the most . Everyone sitting around a large tray to taste a delicious put. The Senegalese cuisine is simply a sharing cooking, a friendly kitchen what! I also find that Senegalese gastronomy may be the richest in West Africa.

The dishes are mainly served with rice or millet , and fish are very often used , whether fried or braised because the country is by the sea.

In addition to the fish, the Senegalese also embellish their dishes with a lot of vegetables such as cassava, eggplant, carrots etc. Senegalese dishes are mostly very colored and very pretty to see .. LOL 🙂

10) Lakhou Bissap / Ngourbane 

It is a dish made from Mil (Sankhal), peanut flour, white bissap leaves, tamarin and kethiakh (salted and dried fish).

Cooking is actually done as a stew, a one pot Meal so all the ingredients are cooked together. The dish is therefore super rich in protein and especially very good for health. The dish is generally consumed west of Senegal.

9) Domada

It's the tomato sauce served with white rice ! So the recipe for tomato sauce here is very different from what we used to see. In this Senegalese tomato sauce , many vegetables are added after the tomatoes. You can find a piece of cabbage, whole carrots, sweet potatoes, even cassava in the sauce.

The sauce is more than forty minutes to the fire and at the end we add a little flour diluted in water to thicken it a little . Which surely brings another taste to the dish!

So the sauce can be done with fish , in this case we will call it Domada Dienne or with meat, we will have cook Domada Yapp .

8) c 'good or tiébou diola

It is a dish made up of several different things . It is white rice cooked with seafood and guedj (fermenting fish). White rice alone has the taste. The rice is then served with braised fish , accompanied by a small salad of peppers + onions + tomatoes . To which we add, a small preparation made from natétou steamed, of a small sauce made from onion and mustard a bit like the Yassa. And that's not all!

You will still have to make a small sauce made from Bissap and Gombo leaf . The Bissap leaves and the Gombo are first cooked steamed. They will then be pounded with a little water.

Cooking the dish is therefore quite long, but the result is really worth it. It is a dish that fascinates me and that I really want to taste. I assure you!

The recipe you can find it here 🙂

   7) Soupou Kandia (Gombo sauce)

Gombo sauce is such a popular dish in West Africa. I don't even think I even need to present it to you 😁

In the Senegalese version, we have as ingredient:

• Gombo,
• red oil,
• of the Yett (mollusc),
• Guej (dried fish),
• seafood, and
• The NETETOU.

The sauce is generally served with rice in Senegal, not with FUFU as elsewhere. In the blog, you will find a cumbo sauce recipe , but it's the Cameroonian version huh?! 😉 I have not yet tried the Senegalaise version 😅

    6) Thiere Bassi Salt

Here is a dish, which the Senegalese like to cook during the holidays. To celebrate Tamkharit (Achoura) , a religious event among Muslims. For those who want to know more about this holiday, read here.

I focus on the dish lol .. The Thiere Bassi Salté is a dish made from millet , served with a sauce . I have already presented the millet in the blog: here are 5 Idees of Mil's basis . So go check the post, if you want to introduce millet into your diet 😉

Mil couscous, when cooked, is first mixed with white beans, grapes . Before being served with the sauce as such.

The sauce is made from tomato, meat, lots of vegetables . As we have cassava, cabbage, carrots for example. It is a dish whose cooking is really long.

      5) Caldou

The Kaldou or Caldou is a dish from Casamance, in the south of Senegal. It is actually a sauce served on white rice . The sauce is made with fish, lemon and a lot of vegetables (tomato, pepper, chili, garlic and also okra ). What is particular is that the bissap leaves as ingredients are also used.

The bissap leaves are cooked apart from the sauce and at the end they mix them again with okra to complete its preparation. 

The rice is therefore served at the end with its sauce, the bissap leaves, lemons for decoration and large pieces of fish over it. Yum!

Me personally it is by writing this that I also discover this delicious dish so I have not yet had the opportunity to cook myself.

 4) Mafe

The mafé, I think it is a dish that should no longer be presented normally, because in each African country in West Africa we find this delicious sauce made from peanut paste .

According to my research, the dish is from Mali, or it is called Tiga dèguè na. But some also think that the dish is of Senegalese origin. In short, everything I know is that the dish is very popular in Senegal and therefore much appreciated by the Senegalese.

The mafé or peanut sauce can be made with chicken, meat or even fish . It is accompanied very well with white rice.

 The recipe is super easy and will soon be available in the blog! 🙂

      3) Thiou 

Thiou is a delicious stew made from meat, fish and many other vegetables. We have as vegetables carrots, potatoes, turnip, eggplant, cassava. There are different versions of the Thiou depending on the ingredients used. For example, we have

• Thiou Carry : Here the sauce is with curry, vegetables and meat
• Thiou Yap : Here the sauce is made with tomatoes, beef, calf or lamb
• Thiou Dienne : done with tomatoes and fish
• Thiou shooting : the sauce is made from palm oil and fish
• Thiou Kandia : tomato, gombo and meat.

As you can probably guess, Thiou is accompanied with white rice too!

      2) Yassa with chicken 

I'm sure everyone here knows the famous Yassa 😏 chicken . Generally when you hear about the Senegalese dish, it is always the Yassa and the Thiep that comes in the lead 😅.

The Yassa is a word Creole of Casamance which means fry . It is therefore a sauce made from onion and fried or grilled chicken . You can also do the Yassa with meat, in this case we say Yassa Yapp . Or even the Yassa with the grilled fish .

The base of the Yassa is the onions and the lemon. These 2 ingredients are compulsory. And these are the 2 ingredients that we use in the original recipe .

Check the recipe here!

1) Thieboudienne / Tiep bou dièn / Tchep bou dièn / Ceebu Jen 

As I said at the beginning, the Thiéboudienne is the national dish in Senegal . It is therefore undoubtedly the number 1 dish, the most popular dish of my small list 🙂

I read online that this dish would have been invented by a very famous cook called Penda Mbaye around the 19th century. By pushing my research even more, I also came across an article in the newspaper Le Monde which in fact explained that the dish would especially come from a heavy colonial past .

To make the Senegalese worked more vivid in the colonial fields, they were actually given rice to eat in substitution of their basic cereal which was millet and sorghum! What ended in the end in Thiep! And to all the Senegalese dishes based on the rice that we find! 😅

In short, I'm not sure what to think about it all, but what is certain is that the Thieboudian belongs to the Senegalese! It is the most important

The Thieboudian still called “Tiep“ is a word in Wolof which means fish rice . Indeed, “ Dièn” means fish. It is therefore a delicious dish simmered with broken rice with fish and with lots of vegetables. The recipe varies depending on the region , you can have a red, or white thieboudian!

Red Thieboudian is cooked with the tomato and is served with a sauce calls Diaga made from fish dumpling ; On the other hand, the white Thieboudian is made without tomatoes .

I find the recipe is quite complicated, because it requires several steps especially if you want to follow the original version. There are also several ingredients such as rice and fish of course, but also yet (a crustacean or dried fish) and several other vegetables such as cabbage, cassava, carrots etc.

The Thieboudian is also known in other countries in West Africa, but under the name of “ fatty rice”.

In summary….

It was really a real pleasure for me to write this article . More than half of the dishes I presented to you here was also a discovery for me and so I hope that after reading this, you will also know a little more on Senegalese cuisine.

Senegalese gastronomy V has really beyond Yassa, and the thiep that everyone knows. I find that the Senegalese really cook with love and they really take time in the kitchen to develop a dish with different flavors and tastes. In short for me it may be the best kitchen in sub -Saharan Africa and I really want to learn more!

By writing this, I also also learned in the passage some word in Wolof 😆. I know fish means dièn and meat means yapp .. lol

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