Mandazi

Ingredients

• Flour500 g
• Coconut milk250 ml
• Sugar80 g
• Dry yeast7 g
• Egg1
• Ground cardamom2 tsp
• Butter — melted50 g
• Oil for frying1 l
• Salt½ tsp

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Warm the coconut milk and dissolve the yeast in it with a spoon of sugar.

   12 min

2. 2

   Mix the flour with the remaining sugar, the cardamom and the salt.

   5 min

3. 3

   Work in the egg, melted butter and the coconut yeast mixture and knead a soft dough.

   12 min

4. 4

   Let it rise somewhere warm for an hour, until doubled.

   62 min

5. 5

   Divide the dough into four, rolling each piece into a round a centimetre thick.

   12 min

6. 6

   Cut each round into four triangles and let them rest fifteen minutes.

   18 min

7. 7

   Fry at 170 °C for two minutes a side, to a golden colour.

   20 min

About the dish

Mandazi are markedly less sweet than European doughnuts. They are eaten with tea and with savoury food, and half as much sugar goes in as seems right.

The dough is rolled into a circle and cut into quarters. The triangle is the recognisable form: a round doughnut goes by another name in Kenya.

Coconut milk in the dough gives softness and a faint aroma. Made on water, mandazi come out drier and keep less well.

Worth knowing

• — Do not roll the dough thinner than a centimetre. Thin mandazi come out flat and tough instead of puffed.
• — Hold the oil at 170 °C. Hotter, and the crust colours before the middle heats, leaving raw dough inside.
• — Mandazi keep two days in a sealed container and do not stale, thanks to the coconut milk. Warm them in the oven for five minutes.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

340 kcal

Protein

6 g

Fat

14 g

Carbs

48 g

More from Kenya

• Nyama choma — Goat meat grilled slowly over coals in large pieces, with kachumbari and ugali.
• Sukuma wiki — Collard greens stewed with onion and tomato. The everyday accompaniment to ugali across East Africa.
• Kenyan chapati — A soft layered flatbread of wheat dough coiled into a spiral before rolling.