National Dishes of the World

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Nyama choma
Photo: Samuel Kiongo, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

main dish

Nyama choma

Goat or beef slowly roasted over charcoal, served with kachumbari salad and ugali.

Eaten in: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda

Prep
20 min
Cooking
1 h 15 min
Resting
1 h
Total
2 h 35 min
Servings
4

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About the dish

Nyama choma simply means “roasted meat” in Swahili. Most often it is goat – ribs or leg – less often beef or chicken, seasoned with little more than salt and cooked slowly over embers until crisp outside and juicy within. The meat is cut into small pieces and eaten by hand, dipped in salt, with ugali and kachumbari, a salad of tomato, onion and chilli. It is a dish for company: in Kenya and Tanzania people gather over nyama choma to watch football, celebrate and spend long weekend afternoons.

Main ingredients

  • goat or beef
  • salt
  • tomatoes
  • red onion
  • chilli
  • lime

Kenya: A favourite weekend get-together in Kenya: you choose the raw meat at the grill and it comes back chopped on a wooden board.

Tanzania: In Tanzania it is eaten with ugali, chips or roasted plantains, alongside the popular mishkaki skewers.

Uganda: In Uganda grilled meat sold on sticks by the roadside is usually called muchomo.

More: Wikipedia (en)

Recipe

Nyama choma

https://foodmap.ominuvo.com/dish/nyama-choma

Ingredients

4 servings

4 servings

Method

  1. Score the meat in several places, rub it with salt, the juice of one lime and the crushed garlic and leave for an hour.

  2. Light a charcoal grill and wait until the coals are covered in white ash; set the grate high above the heat.

  3. Roast the meat slowly for 60–75 minutes, turning often, until tender and browned outside; move it to a cooler part of the grill if it starts to char.

  4. Meanwhile finely dice the tomatoes and onion, chop the chilli and coriander, mix, squeeze over the juice of the second lime and add salt – this is kachumbari.

  5. Take the meat off the grill, rest it for 5 minutes and chop it into bite-sized pieces.

  6. Serve on a board with a small bowl of salt, the kachumbari and ugali.

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