Groundnut was the word I learned first, years before anyone in that kitchen ever said peanut.
It was a shared house in grad school, and my roommate Kojo cooked on Sundays for whoever happened to be around.
Tomato paste frying in oil until it turned brick red and smelled almost sweet.
Then chicken thighs, then stock, then a scoop of peanut butter loosened in a mug of hot broth before it ever touched the pot.
I asked him once whether it counted as a dessert.
He laughed at me for a solid minute.
It does not.
This is a savory stew, tomato-led, warm with ginger and a whole chile bobbing around in it, and the peanut does the job cream does somewhere else.
Body and roundness, not sugar.
Depending on where you are it goes by maafe in Senegal and Mali, or groundnut stew and groundnut soup in Ghana and Nigeria.
What surprised me when I went looking for recipes is how many of them quietly drop the meat.
Mine keeps the chicken, bone in, the way I was taught, because those bones turn the broth into something worth eating on its own.
The sweet potato goes in late so it stays in real chunks instead of dissolving.
Spoon it over white rice and put a bowl of chopped peanuts on the table!
What West African Peanut Stew Actually Is
This dish belongs to a specific part of the world and it has specific names. Calling it African peanut stew is a bit like calling cassoulet European bean stew.
In Senegal, Mali and Gambia it's maafe, sometimes spelled mafe or maafe, and it comes out of the Mandinka tradition.
In Ghana and Nigeria you'll hear groundnut stew or groundnut soup, and in Ghana it's often eaten with fufu rather than rice.
Groundnut is simply the regional word for peanut, because the plant sets its pods underground.
What all these versions share is a base of tomato and ground peanut, thinned with stock, usually built around a meat, and served over or alongside a starch.
Everything else moves. The greens change, the chile changes, the meat changes with what's available and what the occasion is.
Fair warning: what I'm giving you is an American home cook's version, made with what's in a regular US supermarket. It's a version, not the definitive one, and I'd take a Senegalese grandmother's pot over mine any day of the week.
What It Tastes Like
Savory first, and it stays savory all the way down. This is the thing people get wrong before they've tried it.
The peanut butter reads as richness. It's doing what tahini does in a sesame sauce, giving the liquid weight and a soft nutty coating on the spoon.
Tomato brings the acidity, and it's the loudest single flavor in the bowl.
Ginger and chile lift the whole thing so it never goes heavy or muddy.
The sweet potato is the only genuine sweetness in there, and against a salted, chile-warm broth it lands as a soft counterpoint rather than as candy.
Nobody at my table has ever guessed there's half a jar of peanut butter in the pot.
Ingredients
Two of these are worth being particular about. The peanut butter and the chile.
- Bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (2 lb, about 6). Bone in matters here. The bones give the broth its backbone over a 40 minute simmer, and thigh meat stays tender where breast turns to string. You'll pull the skin off partway through, so don't buy boneless.
- Peanut oil (2 tablespoons). Or any neutral oil. Peanut oil is the regional choice and it doubles down on the flavor you're already building.
- Yellow onion (1 large, diced). The sweet base under everything.
- Garlic (4 cloves, minced). Generous. It disappears into the peanut.
- Fresh ginger (1 tablespoon, minced). Fresh, not ground. It's the thing that keeps the pot from tasting flat and rich.
- Tomato paste (3 tablespoons). Not optional, and not interchangeable with more canned tomato. Frying this is the single most important step in the recipe.
- Crushed tomatoes (1 can, 15 oz). Crushed rather than diced, so it melts into the broth instead of sitting in it as cubes.
- Chicken stock (5 cups). Low sodium so you control the salt at the end, because peanut butter is already salted.
- Smooth conventional peanut butter (¾ cup). This is the one place I'll argue against the natural stuff. Emulsified supermarket peanut butter stays suspended in the broth. Natural peanut butter, the kind you stir, splits far more easily and leaves oil on the surface. If natural is all you have, whisk it very well and keep the heat lower than you think you need.
- Scotch bonnet or habanero (1 whole, pierced twice). Left WHOLE. This is the West African heat source, and whole means you get the fruity apricot aroma of the chile without committing the whole pot to serious heat.
- Sweet potatoes (1 ½ lb, about 2 medium, peeled, ¾ inch chunks). Big chunks. Small dice disintegrates and turns your stew into a puree.
- Ground coriander (1 teaspoon). A light warm background note.
- Kosher salt (1 ½ teaspoons, plus more) and black pepper (½ teaspoon). Season in stages, and taste hard at the end.
- Baby spinach or chopped collards (5 oz). In at the very end. Collards need a few extra minutes, spinach needs two.
- Roasted salted peanuts (⅓ cup, roughly chopped). For the top. Crunch against all that softness, and it's the detail people always comment on.
- Cooked white rice, to serve. Plain long grain. The stew is the event, the rice is the plate.
How to Make West African Sweet Potato Peanut Stew
Step 1: Brown the Chicken
Season the thighs all over with 1 teaspoon of the salt.
Heat the oil in a heavy pot over medium-high heat and lay the thighs in skin side down.
Brown for 6 to 7 minutes without moving them, then flip for 3 more.
You're after color, not doneness. Pull them onto a plate and leave the fat in the pot.
Step 2: Aromatics and the Tomato Paste
Drop the heat to medium and cook the onion in that fat for 6 to 8 minutes, until soft and just starting to color.
Add the garlic and ginger and stir for 1 minute.
Now add the tomato paste and keep it moving for 2 to 3 minutes.
Watch it change. It starts out bright red and loose, and it should end up darker, almost brick colored, sticking to the bottom of the pot and smelling sweet instead of raw and metallic.
That color change is the flavor. Skip it and the stew tastes assembled rather than cooked.
Step 3: Loosen the Peanut Butter
Add the crushed tomatoes, coriander and pepper, scrape the bottom of the pot, and pour in the stock.
Return the chicken and any juices, pull the skin off the thighs now and discard it, and drop in the whole pierced chile.
Ladle about 1 cup of the hot broth into a bowl.
Whisk the peanut butter into it until it's completely smooth with no lumps at all, then pour that mixture back into the pot and stir it through.
Do NOT drop cold peanut butter straight into the pot. It seizes into stubborn lumps that never fully break up, and it's far more likely to split on you later.
Step 4: Simmer With the Sweet Potato
Bring it to a bare simmer, the kind where a bubble breaks the surface every couple of seconds, and hold it there for 20 minutes.
Add the sweet potato chunks and simmer another 20 to 25 minutes, until the potato is tender at the center and the chicken pulls away from the bone.
Fish out the chile and the bones. Shred the meat roughly and return it to the pot.
Step 5: Greens and Seasoning
Stir in the spinach and let it wilt off the heat for 2 minutes, or simmer chopped collards for 8.
Taste and add the remaining salt.
It will need more than you expect. Peanut and sweet potato both flatten salt, and an underseasoned pot is the most common thing wrong with a homemade version.
Spoon over rice and finish with chopped peanuts.
The Three Things That Decide How Good It Is
Get these right and the rest of the recipe is basically waiting. Get them wrong and no amount of extra seasoning rescues the pot.
- Fry the tomato paste until it darkens. Two to three minutes in hot fat, stirring, until it goes brick red and catches slightly on the pot bottom. This cooks off the raw tinned edge and builds the savory base the peanut sits on. It's the difference between a stew that tastes finished and one that tastes like ingredients in liquid.
- Temper the peanut butter first. Whisk it into a cup of hot broth in a separate bowl until it's perfectly smooth, then return it. Cold peanut butter hitting a hot pot seizes, and lumps of it never dissolve no matter how long you simmer.
- Never let it boil after the peanut goes in. A hard boil breaks the emulsion and pushes the peanut oil out onto the surface. Bare simmer only, and lid off. If it does split, pull it off the heat, add a splash of cold stock, and stir hard for thirty seconds. It usually comes back.
Getting the Texture Right
This is a chunky stew, not a blended soup, and that's a real decision rather than an accident. Half the recipes out there are making a different dish.
What you want is a broth thick enough to coat a spoon, loose enough to pour over rice, with sweet potato chunks that sit proud of the surface instead of sinking and vanishing.
Chunk size is how you get there. ¾ inch pieces hold their edges through a 25 minute simmer. Half inch dice will not.
Adding the potato after the peanut butter also helps, because it cooks in a thicker liquid that doesn't batter it around.
If it's too thin: simmer uncovered for another 10 minutes, or mash four or five potato chunks against the side of the pot and stir them in.
If it's too thick: add hot stock a half cup at a time. It thickens noticeably as it sits, so err loose.
Want the smooth version instead? Blend half the pot and stir it back in. That gets you closer to what Ghanaians would call groundnut soup, and it's excellent, it's just not this.
Controlling the Heat
The whole chile trick is the best thing I've learned about cooking with scotch bonnets. You get everything the chile smells like and only as much burn as you want.
- Whole and pierced. Two small knife slits, dropped in with the stock, fished out before serving. Fruity, floral, a gentle background warmth.
- More heat. Leave it in longer, or squeeze it gently against the side of the pot with a spoon before you remove it. Squeeze a little, taste, squeeze again.
- Serious heat. Mince half of it, seeds and all, and add it with the garlic. This is closer to how it's often eaten in the region.
- No scotch bonnet available? A habanero is the same species and behaves identically. Failing that, use ½ teaspoon of cayenne, and accept that you're getting the burn without the perfume.
- Cooking for kids. Leave it whole, pull it after 10 minutes, and put a bottle of hot sauce on the table for the adults.
Variations
- Beef. Swap in 2 lb of chuck cut into 1 ½ inch cubes and simmer for 90 minutes before the sweet potato goes in. Richer, and worth the extra hour.
- Goat. The festive choice across much of the region. Bone-in goat shoulder, 2 hours at a bare simmer, and the broth is on another level.
- Smoked fish or dried shrimp. A West African staple move. Crumble in ¼ cup with the stock for a deep, funky savoriness that peanut takes beautifully.
- Vegetarian. Skip the chicken, use a mushroom-heavy vegetable stock, and add a drained can of chickpeas with the sweet potato. This is what most of the internet already makes and it's genuinely good, just a different dish.
- Coconut milk. Replace 1 cup of the stock with full-fat coconut milk, stirred in at the end. Rounder and softer, and less traditional.
- Okra. Add 8 oz of sliced okra in the last 10 minutes for body and a little silkiness.
What to Serve With It
- Plain white rice. The default, and the right one. It's there to carry the stew.
- Jollof rice. If you're feeding people properly. Tomato on tomato sounds like too much and it absolutely is not.
- Fufu. How it's most often eaten in Ghana, and the whole experience changes when you're scooping instead of spooning.
- Fried plantains. Sweet, caramelized, and the best possible thing on the side of this bowl.
- A sharp onion and tomato salad. Thin sliced red onion, tomato, lime and salt. It cuts the richness and resets your palate between spoonfuls.
Storage, Reheating and Freezing
This is one of those pots that's better on day two. The peanut settles into everything overnight.
- In the fridge. Airtight, up to 4 days. It thickens substantially as it chills, almost to a paste. That's the sweet potato starch and it's completely normal.
- Reheating. Low heat on the stovetop with a splash of stock or water stirred in to loosen it. Keep it under a simmer so the peanut doesn't break.
- Freezing. Up to 3 months. Freeze it before the greens go in, since spinach turns to slime after a thaw. Add fresh greens when you reheat.
- Thawing. Overnight in the fridge, then gentle heat. A microwave thaw is the fastest way to split it.
Recipe FAQs
What is West African peanut stew called?
It depends on the country. In Senegal, Mali and Gambia it's maafe, from the Mandinka tradition. In Ghana and Nigeria it's usually groundnut stew or groundnut soup. Groundnut is the regional word for peanut. There is no single name, because there is no single dish.
What makes West African peanut stew different from other peanut sauces?
The tomato. Southeast Asian peanut sauces lean on coconut, lime, soy or tamarind, and they're usually served as a condiment. This is a tomato and peanut braising liquid that a whole meal is cooked in, and it's savory rather than sweet or sour.
Is peanut stew sweet?
No. It's deeply savory. The peanut butter behaves like a fat and a thickener rather than a sweetener, and the tomato, salt, ginger and chile all pull hard in the other direction. The sweet potato adds a soft background sweetness that sits underneath everything else.
Can I use natural peanut butter?
You can, but it splits more easily because it isn't emulsified. Whisk it into hot broth very thoroughly before it goes in, keep the pot below a simmer afterward, and expect to stir more often. Standard smooth supermarket peanut butter is the more reliable choice here.
Why did my stew split or go oily on top?
It boiled. Once peanut butter is in the pot, a hard boil breaks the emulsion and pushes the oil out. Take it off the heat, add a splash of cold stock, and stir vigorously for about thirty seconds. It normally pulls back together.
Can I make it vegetarian?
Yes. Leave out the chicken, use a rich mushroom or vegetable stock, and add a drained can of chickpeas along with the sweet potato. Increase the tomato paste to 4 tablespoons to make up for the savoriness the chicken was providing.
Can I make it in a slow cooker?
Brown the chicken and fry the tomato paste on the stovetop first, because a slow cooker cannot do either. Then transfer everything except the peanut butter, sweet potato and greens and cook on LOW for 5 hours. Stir in the tempered peanut butter and the potato for the final 90 minutes, greens at the end.
How do I store and reheat it, and does it freeze?
Fridge for up to 4 days, and it thickens a lot as it chills. Reheat gently with a splash of stock and never let it boil. It freezes well for 3 months if you leave the greens out and add them fresh on reheating.
Recipe
West African Sweet Potato Peanut Stew
Ingredients
For the Stew
- 2 lb bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs about 6
- 1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt plus more to taste
- 2 tablespoons peanut oil or other neutral oil
- 1 large yellow onion diced
- 4 cloves garlic minced
- 1 tablespoon fresh ginger minced
- 3 tablespoons tomato paste
- 15 oz crushed tomatoes 1 can
- 5 cups low-sodium chicken stock
- ¾ cup smooth peanut butter conventional, not natural
- 1 whole scotch bonnet or habanero chile pierced twice, left whole
- 1 ½ lb sweet potatoes peeled, cut into ¾ inch chunks
- 1 teaspoon ground coriander
- ½ teaspoon black pepper freshly ground
- 5 oz baby spinach or chopped collard greens
To Serve
- ⅓ cup roasted salted peanuts roughly chopped
- 4 cups cooked white rice
Instructions
Brown the Chicken
- Season the chicken thighs all over with 1 teaspoon of the salt.
- Heat the oil in a heavy pot over medium-high heat. Lay the thighs in skin side down and brown undisturbed for 6 to 7 minutes, then flip and brown 3 minutes more. Transfer to a plate, leaving the fat in the pot.
Build the Base
- Reduce the heat to medium and cook the onion in the rendered fat for 6 to 8 minutes, until soft and just beginning to color.
- Add the garlic and ginger and stir for 1 minute.
- Add the tomato paste and stir constantly for 2 to 3 minutes, until it darkens to a brick red, sticks lightly to the pot and smells sweet rather than raw. This step builds the savory base.
- Stir in the crushed tomatoes, coriander and black pepper, scraping the bottom of the pot, then pour in the stock.
Temper the Peanut Butter
- Return the chicken and any collected juices to the pot. Pull off and discard the skin from each thigh. Add the whole pierced chile.
- Ladle 1 cup of the hot broth into a bowl and whisk the peanut butter into it until completely smooth, then stir the mixture back into the pot. Never add cold peanut butter directly to the pot.
Simmer and Finish
- Bring to a bare simmer and cook uncovered for 20 minutes. Do not let it boil once the peanut butter is in, or the stew will split.
- Add the sweet potato chunks and simmer 20 to 25 minutes more, until tender at the center and the chicken pulls from the bone.
- Remove the chile and the bones. Roughly shred the meat and return it to the pot.
- Stir in the spinach and let it wilt off the heat for 2 minutes, or simmer chopped collards for 8 minutes. Taste and add the remaining salt, it will need more than you expect.
- Serve over white rice, topped with chopped roasted peanuts.
Notes
- Fry the tomato paste: 2 to 3 minutes until it darkens is the single biggest flavor step in the recipe.
- Temper the peanut butter: whisk it smooth into a cup of hot broth before it enters the pot, or it will seize into lumps.
- Never boil after the peanut goes in: a hard boil breaks the emulsion. If it splits, take it off the heat, add a splash of cold stock and stir hard.
- Chunk size: ¾ inch sweet potato holds its shape. Smaller dice dissolves and turns the stew into a puree.
- Heat control: the whole pierced chile gives aroma without committing the pot. Squeeze it against the side for more heat, or mince half of it in for serious heat.
- Storage: 4 days refrigerated, 3 months frozen without the greens. It thickens as it sits, so loosen with stock on reheating.
