West African cooking with AI bots: techniques, ingredients and prompts

Core techniques

• Building a tomato-pepper-onion base (obe ata in Yoruba cooking) and frying it down
• Making soups thickened with ground egusi seeds, okra or groundnut (peanut)
• Pounding or stirring starchy swallows (fufu, eba, banku)
• Smoking and drying fish for flavor

Key ingredients

• Scotch bonnet / habanero
• Red palm oil
• Tomatoes, red bell pepper, onion
• Groundnuts (peanuts), egusi (melon seeds)
• Smoked/dried fish, crayfish
• Cassava, yam, plantain
• Locust bean (iru/dawadawa), bouillon

Flavor logic

Heat from Scotch bonnet, deep umami from fermented locust bean and dried fish, richness from palm oil or peanut, and starch to scoop it all up.

Dishes to start with

• Jollof rice
• Egusi soup
• Groundnut (peanut) stew / maafe
• Thieboudienne (Senegal)
• Kelewele (spiced plantain)

Bot prompts that get better answers

I want to learn West African home cooking properly.
1. Explain the main regional styles and what makes each distinct.
2. Teach me the 3 core techniques I should practice first, with common mistakes.
3. Give me a starter pantry list, with substitutes available in a typical US supermarket, and say how each substitute changes the result.
Say when something varies by region or family, and don't present one version as the only "authentic" one.

Walk me through making Jollof rice for [n] people.
Ingredients in grams and US measures. Explain why each key step matters.
Include the USDA safe internal temperature for any meat, poultry, seafood or eggs.
Then suggest one traditional variation and where it comes from.

I'm making a West African dish and it tastes [flat / too salty / too sour / too spicy].
Using the flavor logic of West African cooking, suggest one small fix at a time.

How we wrote this

Cuisines are living traditions with big regional and family differences; this is a respectful starting map, not the one true way. Use the bot prompts to explore, then learn from cooks, cookbooks and restaurants from that tradition. Meat and egg doneness still follows FoodSafety.gov safe minimum temperatures.

Checked Oct 29, 2026. Bots sometimes invent "authentic" facts; ask them to say how sure they are and to separate tradition from guesswork.