Sufi Spice · Peppered Street Coffee
Café Touba
Photo: EquipeTKN / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
It's named after a holy city and was kept inside a single Sufi brotherhood for nearly a century before it broke out onto every street corner in the country.
Café Touba is coffee roasted and ground together with djar (grains of Selim, a peppery spice), giving it a warm, peppery, almost incense-like flavor. Street vendors pour it from kettles into small paper or plastic cups for a few coins on corners across Senegal.
Why it's made this way: Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood, is credited with introducing the spiced coffee in the late 19th century, and from the 1990s it spread from Mouride circles to street corners nationwide.
More from Senegal
Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below.
Photo credits.