River State Native Soup

River state native soup is one of my favorite Nigerian soup, it happens to be my favorite native soup.
You can follow either my written instruction or the embedded video at the bottom of the page, I make videos for the majority of my recipes on this site.

I grew up in River state Nigeria, did both my primary and secondary education in a very popular part of the state. During this time, I tasted almost every indigenous food and also learned to make quite a number of them. The good thing is that they share similar recipes with the Igbos.

So if you are dating an Ikwerre guy or married to a man/woman from River State Nigeria you can go ahead and serve him/her some of our Igbo foods on this page.

Let’s get back to the topic of the day, River state native soup… here goes… Gbam!!!

Frankly, I can’t give a detailed account of the origin of this soup but what I do know is that it is very popular in River state and it is served in major restaurants and eateries. Although, they avoid some of the expensive ingredients like stock fish, ngolo and shrimps.

For some reason I just like to try new recipes once they appealed to me, I like to ask questions and try them out in my own kitchen, that is perhaps the reason I have learned to make virtually all the Foods Eaten In Nigeria.

How To Make River State Native Soup

Below are the ingredients for making the popular native soup in River state Nigeria, like I always assert; the ingredients would serve about 6×2 people, you can increase or decrease the quantity of each ingredient depending on the number people would be eating your food.

You can make this soup as simple as possible, if you can’t find the ngolo and prowns where you live, you can leave them out. I can’t find the english name for Ngolo, is it clams?

• 1KG of meat
• 10 pieces of stock fish ear (nti okporoko)
• 2 cups of sliced uziza leaves
• 2 medium size dry fish
• Cocoa yam as thickener (see image)
• 15-20cl of palm oil
• 2-3 cubes of maggi or knorr
• 1-2 cups of periwinkles
• 1-2 cups of ngolo
• 1 cup of ground crayfish
• Salt and pepper to taste.
• two handful of fresh prowns
• 2 spoons of ofor (alternative thickener)

The cocoayam should be about 1KG, the ofor serves as alternative thickener (incase the cocoayam didn’t thicken the soup), in most cases, you wouldn’t use it (the ofor)

How to Prepare Nigerian Native soup

I like to parboil the meat with just 2 cubes of maggi, 1 bulb of onions, salt and maybe a sachet of onga classic (a very popular Nigerian spice for soup). My choice of meat is hard to cook, takes about 50-60 minutes before you commence with the rest of the cooking.

Step 2
Use this time to prepare the other ingredients; wash and slice the uziza leaves.

Soak the stock fish and dry fish with boiled water and wash thoroughly to remove sand and center bone. Grind the crayfish and fresh pepper also, you can grind together or grind separately.

Step 3
Add the washed dry fish/stock fish in the boiling meat on fire, after about 30-50 minutes of cooking just the meat. Once they are soft and the water is almost dried (about 1 cup left) add about 5-7 cups of water, palm oil and the ground crayfish. This step was visually demonstrated in the video below, so if you like watching better than reading you can scroll down to see the video.

Allow the soup to cook for another ten minutes before adding salt to taste, a cube of maggi. Maggi is a natural food sweetener, used in making almost all the {foods eaten in Nigeria} you can refer to our ingredients catalogue for an in-depth understanding of all the ingredients used in making Nigerian foods.

Step 4
Add the washed/cleaned ngolo, stir, add the cocoayam, allow to dissolve in 8-10 minutes, if it is still very watery you can add a spoon of ofor, cook for three minutes before adding the periwinkles, prown and sliced uziza leaves which is likely the last ingredient while making River state native soup.

Allow to simmer for another five minutes and you just made Nigerian’s most popular native soup.
The video is that of an earlier version of this soup, it should give you a clue as to how to make river state native soup, I used ofor as the thickener instead of cocoayam; I also ommited the ngolo.

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