How to make Efo Riro with shoko

Wednesday, January 17, 2018 at 2:36 PM by Regina Stets 4 min read

Do you want to prepare a delicious meal for your family and friends in a genuine Nigerian tradition? Here is a full recipe for making Efo Riro, the traditional Nigerian soup which will taste heavenly once you try it. Learn how to make Efo Riro with shoko in our article.

Efo Riro: the best Nigerian vegetable soup

Efo Riro is one of the most prominent Yoruba cuisine dishes. It is a traditional vegetable soup that has been a major player in Yoruba people's(home and abroad) kitchen throughout the years. It is considered to be one of the healthiest traditional dishes, because of the nutrients shoko contains.

This traditional Yoruba soup is usually cooked with meat, fish, a plenty of green vegetables including spinach, peppers, tomatoes (at times) and other products depending on the cook’s personal preferences. It can be taken with fufu, pounded yams, amala, eba, elubo, and tuwo shinkafa. Efo Riro is especially delicious when you serve it together with boiled rice, yams, plantains, and other similar products.

How to cook Efo Riro? Detailed recipe

So, here is a full Efo Riro recipe that you can use for your own cooking needs. First of all, the ingredients that soup requires are:

3 onion of large size
5 tablespoonful of ground crayfish
4 teaspoon of ogiri, dawadawa or iru (this is optional)
3 spoonfuls of palm oil
5 bell peppers and 3 fresh tomatoes
1 kg of shoko or spinach leaves (if you purchase them in Nigerian market, you will need 4 wraps)
4 scotch bonnet peppers
4 stock cubes
250 g of assorted fish (smoked or stock fish)
250 g of assorted meat (which is beef, cow skin, or tripe)
salt for adding the taste

How to prepare the soup

Before you start cooking the soup, you should pick the vegetables and thoroughly wash them. Then, you will need to cut all the vegetables into the tiny pieces. If you want to get rid of excessive liquid in the soup, you can squeeze out excess water from your vegetables, because the vegetable would have retained some water while its being washed. Then, you can put them aside.

Afterwards, you can wash your fish and meat. Get rid of all the bones in the smoked fish, and then put these products away. The next step will be blending the tomatoes and peppers. Now, you are ready to go forward and start the actual cooking part.

The first step is seasoning the assorted meat and fish, and cooking it together with the onions and a stock cube, then adding a bit of salt for the taste or some other seasoning depending on your preferences. You should be aware that the tougher meat has to be cooked before the other meat or left in the pot after removing the softer meat. Cook it until the liquid that is in your pot is all dried up, and your meat and fish are tender – you may need to try and touch them to check.
Now, take the other pot which is completely dry, for heating up palm oil. Keep heating it up until it starts giving out a little smoke. Then, add peppers and tomatoes and fry the mixture until it stops being sour. This would usually take you about fifteen to twenty minutes.
After that, you are free to add the meat and fish which is already cooked. Then, you can spice it up with a stock cube, ground crayfish and iru (or any other ingredient of your choice). Mix the whole thing thoroughly, cover it and leave boiling for approximately ten minutes.
When ten minutes are up, you can add the vegetables and/or salt to make the soup even tastier. Mix it again to make sure that everything was distributed throughout the soup evenly. Afterwards, it has to simmer for about five minutes.
Congratulations! Your delicious traditional Nigerian soup is ready, and now you can enjoy it!