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In this recipe, we’re going to make jollof rice. This is a popular West African dish that has lots and lots of variations. I’m doing this as a vegan friendly recipe, although a lot of people make this with prawns, chicken, beef or other meat.

It’s one of those recipes with lots of different stories about where it originated. I’m not going to get into any of that here.

But it is a great one for when you have a bit of time to cook, maybe on a Sunday or when you have people coming round.

The prep for this recipe will probably take between 15-20 minutes. It will then cook for just under an hour.

The ingredients are listed in the video description below. But you can see we have our rice and then the ingredients for our sauce. So an onion, a tomato, a pepper, a Scotch Bonnet pepper, some garlic and ginger. Then we have our spices and herbs, thyme, some curry powder, tomato paste, bouillon powder, a bit of salt, some oil, and some water for cooking the rice.

All ingredients should be laid out on the surface.

You’ll also need a knife and chopping board, a blender, a sieve, a large pot with a lid, some measuring spoons and a jug.

These will all be laid out

We’ll start by washing the rice. You can rinse it in the sieve and then just set it aside. I’ve already washed this, so you can see how the water is running clear. Actually doing this will take a couple of minutes.

Rice will be pre-washed.

Now we’ll chop the tomatoes, pepper, onion and ginger. These can be chopped quite roughly, as they’re just going to go into the blender.

All the veg will be pre-chopped except for a bit of each that we can use for demonstration

Of course. If you don’t want this to be too spicy, just use less of the Scotch Bonnet pepper. Or you could even leave it out and just add 1 to 2 teaspoons of Cayenne pepper.

Once you’ve got everything chopped, you can of course pop those in a bowl and cover them if you need a rest now.

If you’re ready for the next step, we’re going to make the sauce. So we’ll put those tomatoes, peppers, onion and garlic from before into the blender and whizz it up.

Once you’ve got that into a nice sauce consistency, heat up the oil in our large pot and add the sauce. Take care not to let the oil splash up.

Cook that for about three minutes.

Now we add the curry powder, thyme, tomato paste and vegetable bouillon cubes. If you’re worried about your salt intake, there are low salt alternatives to these or you can use ???, with that vegetable bouillon, you could use a low salt variety or make your own vegetable stock.

We’ll link to a recipe for homemade stock in the recipe.

And we cook that for another couple of minutes.

I have no idea. But it would be great if they could and even package up and save the sauce for a later date…

Now we take our rice, that’s all rinsed, and add it to the pan. Stir it so that the rice is totally covered by the sauce.

Once you’ve got it all covered, add your water or vegetable broth. If you are worried about salt, feel free just to use water here.

Bring this up to the boil and then cover and reduce to a low heat.

You’re going to let this cook for between 45 to 50 minutes. You’ll know when it’s ready when the rice is fluffy and tender. It shouldn’t be chewy.

If you did want to add some cooked chicken or prawns, you can do that when?

So now this is done, you can see that lovely colour and how fluffy the rice is.

It’s perfect for that. Jollof rice is usually served for celebrations and birthdays and special occasions like that.

Scaling this up is fairly easy as well. Espcially once you’ve made it a few times and know how much spice you want in that sauce.