Nigerian Pepper Soup

Make Ahead and Storage

Refrigerate up to 3 days and freeze 2 months. Add fresh scent leaves on reheating.

Making Nigerian Pepper Soup

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1. Toast the ehuru, uda, uziza, grains of paradise and peppercorns in a dry pan for 2 minutes until fragrant, then grind to a powder. Sieve out any husks.

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2. If using goat, put it in a pot with the onion, half the ground spice, the stock cubes and 1 teaspoon of salt, and cover with water.

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3. Simmer 60 to 90 minutes until tender, topping up with hot water. Chicken needs 30 minutes; fish is added right at the end.

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4. Blend the scotch bonnets, garlic and ginger with a splash of water and add it to the pot.

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5. Add the ground crayfish, the remaining salt and 2 litres of water in total, and simmer 20 minutes.

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6. Taste the broth. It should be clean, hot and thin — if it is dull, more spice and more salt.

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7. If using fish, slide it in now and poach 8 minutes without stirring.

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8. Stir in the remaining ground spice blend and the palm oil, if using, and take the pot off the heat.

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9. Add the scent leaves, cover, and leave 5 minutes.

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10. Serve very hot in bowls with lime, and with agidi or boiled yam alongside.

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Related guide: Ingredient substitutions.

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Worth Knowing

• Half the spice early, half at the end. The aroma does not survive a long simmer.
• Keep it thin. Pepper soup is drunk, not spooned through.
• Fish goes in last and is never stirred.

Behind the Recipe

Pepper soup spice is a specific blend — ehuru, uda, uziza and grains of paradise — and its aroma is volatile, so half goes in early for depth and half at the end for perfume. The broth is deliberately thin: it is a soup to drink, and thickening it changes what the dish is for.

Serving Ideas

Boiled yam or agidi · A cold beer · Lime wedges

Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Nigerian Fried Rice, Pounded Yam, Fufu.

Changing the Recipe

• Lemon is the everyday swap for lime in this kind of dish — the acidity plays the same role even though the flavour is not identical.
• If you only have ground ginger, a quarter-teaspoon for each tablespoon of fresh is the ratio usually given; it tastes warmer and less bright than the fresh root.
• An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.

The Numbers per Serving

No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.

Gluten-free when made with stock cubes labelled gluten-free.

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