Recipes with peanuts

The peanut is not a nut: it is a legume that ripens underground. That shows in the kitchen, because it behaves like a fatty bean — rich enough to thicken a sauce on its own, neutral enough to take chilli, acid and sugar all at once. Whole, as paste or as oil, it plays a completely different part each time.

West Africa builds on the paste, which becomes the body of the dish itself: Senegalese vegetable mafé, Ghanaian groundnut soup and Ivorian foutou with groundnut sauce cook it long enough for the oil to rise to the surface, the sign the sauce is ready; Senegalese lakh takes it sweet instead. South-East Asia prefers the roasted, crushed kernel, added at the end for crunch and scent: Thai som tam, Indonesian pecel, Vietnamese fresh spring rolls and mì Quảng, and Indian poha, where it is fried before the flattened rice goes in. Peanuts are among the major allergens that must be declared.

One technical point: sweetened, emulsified commercial peanut butter is not a substitute for pure paste. If it is all you have, cut the sugar in the recipe and loosen the sauce with hot water added little by little — never a cold splash, which will make it split.