Ayamase Prawn Pasta | Pasta In Green Pepper Sauce With Prawns

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Ayamase prawn pasta, which is pasta cooked in a spicy green pepper sauce is a simple dish which is big on flavours. If you like your food spicy and are looking for an alternative to pasta in tomato or creamy sauce, then this should be right up your alley. It is also a great alternative to a rice dish when you are hosting.

This dish was inspired by Ayamase stew, which has origins in West Africa. If you would to know more about this stew, please read this blog post.

Ayamase pasta is a very versatile dish which could be adapted to vegetarian by omitting the prawns and ground crayfish.

What You Will Need To Make Ayamase Pasta

A few notes about ingredients..

• Scotch bonnet: Ayamase is a hot sauce and green scotch bonnet is one of the characteristic ingredients. If you find scotch bonnet too hot, you can substitute with other milder green chilis like jalapeno or totally skip.
• Vegetables: You can add any extra vegetable or just swap the peas with your preferred vegetables
• Protein: You can use a different protein to prawns. Chicken breasts or fish fillets cut into small pieces will work very well with this recipe. You just need to add in earlier so as to cook through properly.
• Red palm-oil: Keeping to the traditional ayamase recipe, I used red palm oil for this pasta dish; which worked quite well. You can replace with other oils if you don’t have access to red palm oil. If you are not familiar with red palm oil, then you must read this post about West Africa’s most important cooking oil.
• Ground crayfish: This is another traditional ayamase stew ingredient. It is basically dried, ground crayfish which is used to flavour savoury dishes in West African cooking. I couldn't think of a substitute for this ingredient, but you can cook ayamasa pasta without it if not available. It is usually sold in Asian and African stores. It is also available on Amazon.

How to Make It

Cook the pasta with salt, according to pack instructions and keep aside.

Remove stalk from bell pepper and scotch bonnet and add into a blender. Peel the onion and garlic; blend with the peppers.

Add the palm-oil into a pan and allow leave for about 2 mins to bleach slightly. Add the blended mixture with the ground crayfish, bouillon cube and some salt.

Mix and allow to cook under medium heat. This should take around 15 mins and should look like this.

Add the prawns and peas. Allow to cook for further 5 mins.

Toss in the pasta and allow to heat through before removing from heat.

Other West African inspired dishes to try are;

Ayamase one-pot rice

Nigerian native jollof rice