Sweetener · Nile Dates
Asal Balah (Dongola Date Syrup)
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: w:en:User:Hakeem.gadi / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Made from prized local varieties like gondela and barakawi, the syrup is boiled down twice — the pulp strained and re-boiled a second time — to concentrate its sweetness before it's ready to eat.
Dongola's date palms, grown along the Nile's fertile northern banks, produce a syrup made by slow-boiling ripe dates, straining the pulp, then reducing the liquid again into a thick, dark syrup. It's drizzled over gurasa or kisra as an everyday sweetener.
Why it's made this way: The Dongola Reach is one of Sudan's most productive date-growing stretches of the Nile, and turning surplus dates into a shelf-stable syrup has long let Nubian farmers store the harvest's sweetness well past the short date season.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
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