Talk:Couscous
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[edit] Pronunciation
How do you pronounce this word? 128.12.32.199 18:45, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Crickets
i'm sure iv'e read somewhere that some of the traditional methods of preperation used crushed crickets or locusts, as a source of protien. Can some one please tell me if this is true one way or the other.
Which ingredients is it made of? -- Hannes Hirzel
I don't know. Whatever pasta's made of. Probably semolina. There are several different recipes for it, just like with any pasta.
The OED says this: "The grain of the African Millet, Holcus spicatus Linn., Penicillaria spicata Willd., a cereal indigenous to Africa, where it has constituted from the earliest times an important article of food." first recorded use around 1600. Entry for "millet" as follows: "A graminaceous plant, Panicum miliaceum, native of India but extensively cultivated as a cereal in the warmer parts of Europe, growing three or four feet high, and bearing on a terminal spike or panicle a large crop of minute nutritious seeds. a. The grain." That seems different than semolina (my speculation above), which is made from wheat. ... Maybe that's just another way to make it? I'm seeing a lot of websites showing it made from semolina too.
The first reference I saw listed semolina, and the stuff I use is definitely semolina, but it doesn't surprize me that the originaly was millet (which is a different grain--semolina is a grind of wheat). That makes more sense given the climate of North Africa. It's probably us Europeans who started making the stuff from wheat later.
- Millet is a different plant -- a type of sorghum (or related to sorghum) -- Marj
- As far as I know, it's not a European import, but a price issue - couscous made from semolina is better, but more expensive than barley or millet couscous. Mustafaa 18:49, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Talk from the "cous cous" page:
Huh? What part of the Middle East? The kind I've had is always wheat flour, and never any sight of fleshy parts of baobab trees. Does the composition differ regionally?
- Ditto - besides, there already is an article on couscous. -- Marj Tiefert, Monday, June 17, 2002
DONE! :-) -- Marj Tiefert, Monday, June 17, 2002
One question about cooking - I seem to recall a whole involved ritual of steaming rather than boiling, which keeps the grains from sticking together. Anybody know more? -- Marj
I've never seen couscous described as a pasta before. I thought it was a bit like a smaller version of bulger wheat, a cracked wheat. Looking at google [1] it seems that half the time it's defined as cracked wheat, and the other half it's defined as pasta. I'm very confused. fabiform | talk 18:36, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Couscous is pasta. The cracked wheat stuff is tabbouleh. -- Marj 18:55, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- I've been researching this. It seems that it's called a pasta in the USA, but not in (most/all?) other countries. Couscous is steamed semolina (ground durum wheat which is coarser than regular wheat flour). Good pasta is made from semolina, but it is made into a paste with water (that's what pasta means - paste) and rolled or extruded into shapes. So couscous isn't a pasta, although this article should certainly say that it is considered to be a pasta in the USA.
- Tabbouleh is a salad made from vegetables and cracked durum wheat (also called bulger wheat). fabiform | talk 22:00, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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- I have no idea whether it's a pasta or not, but I do know that "couscous" refers to semolina grains stuck together with water, not to the grains themselves (which are called smeed in the area). According to the definition you cite, that makes it a pasta. Or to quote the link at the end:
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- To make couscous grains, place several handfuls of semolina in the gsaa, sprinkle them with salty water, then roll the resulting lumps in the gsaa under your palm. Small grains or pellets will form. Repeat this process until all of the semolina is rolled into small pellets. Sprinkle a little flour on the pellets as needed to help separate them.
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- Sift the pellets through the ghorbal. The smaller, finished grains will drop through the screen into a basket or other container. Tip the larger grains into the tbak so they can be rolled again without returning them to the gsaa. As you roll them, sprinkling with flour as necessary, they will break up to become smaller pellets. Sift again in the ghorbal, re-roll and sift again, until all of the grains have passed through the ghorbal and are thus of suitable dimension—a size that the 14th-century writer Ibn Razin al-Tujibi described as "the size of ants' heads." Any larger grains remaining in the ghorbal when you are tired of rolling can be used for burkukis.
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- - Mustafaa 08:33, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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- We must be talking about two different things, both of which need to be discussed in this article. I've found several recipes which are simply steamed semolina. This is the kind of couscous I eat. Other methods, like the one above, seem to form small pasta pellets, as you say, from semolina. I wonder if it's "semolina" that is the problem? I've seen a few references to "coarse semolina" being steamed to make couscous. Others call it "semolina flour", and talk of making couscous from it. It sounds like these semolinas are different, it makes sense that you have to roll and sieve the semolina if it's a fine-ground flour, but not if it's wheat ground to particles which can be nearly a millimeter in diameter (as semolina says).
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- Thanks. There does seem to be some variety in what the term refers to - I've even heard it used to talk about tabbouleh, as someone mentioned! I'm pretty sure the "pasta" method is the traditional one, but I guess it's not the only way to make it... Mustafaa 09:11, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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- I emailed the manufacturer that I get my couscous from (which is described as dried steamed semolina) and asked them how they make it. And they responded! So, I now know that they make couscous just like you describe with the water and sieves and whatnot, and it was their description on the packet which was confusing me. I still think it's wrong to call it a pasta (just because I've never heard it called that), but I will try to fix the article so that it all makes sense. :) fabiform | talk 18:52, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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is that a berber food?
- originally, yes. it's spread a bit more widely since...
thinks.
[edit] Image
(copyvio image removed)--Duk 06:22, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
is this a copyvio? anyone else have pics of couscous? The bellman 07:20, 2005 Jan 27 (UTC)
[edit] History, and Sub-Sahara
Added quite a lot to this page, but have I gone overboard with links to other Wiki pages?? Much of this information is from the historian Clifford White.--Dumarest 13:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Came back to this site, and found a bit of editing on my spelling - 'Kitab al-tatbikh' is current for the manuscript title, thanks for noting my 'h' which should have been 'b'. But the source of the title has this as 'Kitab al-tabikh' - I don't believe that the extra 't' belongs there.--Dumarest 13:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
- Sorry, you're quite right. My Arabic went wrong. I've corrected that change. --Drmaik 20:28, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] foo-foo
Sorry if I have the spelling wrong - the Wiki article says that foo-foo in West Africa is often called cous-cous. I have no idea if this is correct, but I have added that info to this article. Please correct if it is wrong and do likewise to the foo-foo article. --Dumarest 19:50, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
