Suya (Skewered Beef in a Dry Peanut and Chilli Rub)

Variations

• Tsire is the Hausa word for the same skewers; suya is the name that travelled.
• Balangu and bujera: Hausa grilled meat done without the rub — the salt-only end of the same tradition.
• Cuts: beef is the default, but chicken, goat, ram and gizzard are all normal, and a plate often carries several at once, as the photograph here does.
• Kilishi: the same spicing brushed onto meat sliced paper-thin and then dried. Suya's jerky sibling, and it keeps for weeks.
• Across West Africa: it is eaten in Niger, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad as well. ko.wikipedia describes it first as "a West African meat skewer" and then as "a characteristic Hausa dish, commonly associated with the Hausa of northern Nigeria" — the attribution here follows the second sentence, as jollof rice already does for a dish shared even more widely.

Tips

• Grilling sorts grilled meat into two kinds, and files this as the third. That guide's section is headed "Salted meat and marinated meat are different dishes" — salt only (yakiniku) against marinated (bulgogi, jerk chicken). Suya is neither. Nothing is steeped in liquid and the meat does not go on bare; it goes on wearing a dry powder pressed into it.
• Why the peanut has to be defatted is the whole dish. Roasted peanut is about half fat. Ground and put on meat over fire, that fat melts and runs, and it brings on exactly what the same guide warns about: "Fat dripping into flame is not a good sear developing. Those flames deposit soot." The oil pressed out, kuli-kuli is a dry powder — it stays where it is put and toasts rather than burns.
• Satay solves the same problem the other way round. It keeps the peanut away from the fire altogether and pours it over as a sauce once the skewers are cooked. Suya is the dish that found a way to put peanut and fire together.
• Having no sugar in it is what sets the heat. The same guide says sugar in a marinade goes on at the end, because sugar starts burning around 150°C. There is none in yaji, so full heat from the start is available and colour can be chased freely.
• The rub goes on twice. The half applied before cooking takes the heat and becomes the crust; the half thrown on as it leaves the fire is never cooked and stays aromatic. Do it once and you lose one or the other.
• Slicing thin is how it is seasoned. What marinades do says a marinade reaches one to three millimetres in. A dry rub does not get in at all, so the only lever is thickness — less of it, and more surface for the powder to sit on.
• The opposite end from nyama choma, whose own page says salt is essentially the whole seasoning list. Same charcoal, same skewer idea, opposite extremes.