Suya

The mai suya, the suya man, is a recognised trade with its own apprenticeship, and the spread of suya southward through Nigeria and outward across West Africa followed Hausa trading and cattle-droving routes. It is one of the very few kebab traditions in the world built around a nut rather than a spice as its defining ingredient.

Suya is the thin-sliced, loosely fanned member of a Hausa family that stretches across the Sahel. Tsire is the same beef ribbon woven tightly onto slender sticks, and in Sudan the trade goes by agashe, with coarsely crushed peanuts and a pinch of cardamom. Ghana's kyinkyinga switches to 2 cm cubes rolled twice in tankora, while Cameroon's soya uses thicker strips or chunks that need 12 to 15 minutes over medium coals. Balangu drops the crust and serves the yaji as a dip, and kilishi dries the beef into shelf-stable, peanut-coated sheets.

Compare: Tsire · Agashe · Kyinkyinga · Soya (Cameroonian Suya) · Balangu · Kilishi

Yaji is the dish and its base is kuli-kuli — groundnut cake left after peanut oil is pressed out — ground to a powder with dried chilli, ginger, garlic powder, onion powder and often cloves or negro pepper. Using the defatted cake rather than whole peanuts matters: whole peanuts have too much oil and the rub goes greasy and burns.

The meat is sliced very thin and threaded onto flat skewers in a ribbon, then fanned open so both faces are exposed. It is oiled, coated in yaji, grilled fast, and then coated again after cooking — the second application never sees the fire, which is why it stays bright and pungent while the first has toasted into a crust.

Beef is standard — a lean cut such as topside or sirloin, sliced very thin. Ram and offal versions exist and are popular. Kuli-kuli is sold in African groceries; if it is unavailable, roasted peanuts blitzed and then blotted hard to remove oil is the workaround, but the texture is never quite right.

The chilli should be a dried African bird's-eye or scotch bonnet, ground. Ginger powder in quantity, plus garlic powder, onion powder and salt. Groundnut oil for brushing. Raw onion and sliced tomato for serving, and newspaper or brown paper to wrap.

Wrapped in newspaper with sliced raw onion, tomato and a heap of extra yaji for dipping. Eaten with the fingers standing at the stall, in the evening. A cold beer or a soft drink. It is night food and the stalls do not open until dark. In Nigerian cities the suya spot doubles as the after-work meeting point, and the unwrapping has its own ritual: paper opened flat on the counter, onions scattered over the hot meat, extra yaji shaken from a jar that never seems to empty.