Bsisa is a typical Mediterranean food, based on flour of roasted barley which dates back to Roman times. Bsisa is a variety of mixtures of roasted cereals ground with fenugreek and aniseed and cumin and sugar. This kind of food is known throughout Tunisia and Libya.
Source: BBC Travel – https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220130-bsissa-north-africas-newest-breakfast-trend
When blended with olive oil and honey, this unassuming brown powder – which has been eaten by Tunisians and Libyans for millennia – transforms into a breakfast of champions.
Along the curving bay of Tunisia’s southern Gulf of Hammamet is the pretty village of Lamta, marked by its ornate blue and white doorways, eclectic architecture and shops selling bsissa, a nutritious food that has been loved and eaten by Tunisians and Libyans for millennia.
Traditionally, this simple beige-coloured powder is based on the regional staples of roasted hard durum wheat and barley that have been flavoured with fennel seed, aniseed and marjoram, and then ground. It’s often augmented with ground nuts – roasted pulses such as chickpeas, lentils or fava beans – and other additions like ground sesame seeds and carob, to ramp up its already substantial nutritional value. When blended with olive oil and honey into a thick cream and decorated with roasted nuts, this unassuming brown dust – a veritable ugly duckling of the food world – transforms into a breakfast of champions.
As people today search for the next “superfood”, this ancient powder is becoming increasingly popular in North Africa and beyond for its purported health benefits. Locals have learned that the bsissa their mum once made them for breakfast is as good as – if not better than – any trendy protein shake. Being high in complex carbohydrates and fibre, it releases energy slowly, has 15 to 18g of protein per 100g, and is packed with vitamin C as well as minerals including iron, potassium, zinc, magnesium and calcium. More and more, it’s becoming available on menus at cafes and a growing number of eco-hotels that offer yoga retreats.
However, long before hipster kitchens buzzed to the sound of power smoothies, farmers and caravan drivers in the Maghreb – which runs from Libya in the east of North Africa to the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco – carried sacks of bsissa to ensure they’d have a good source of nutrition, even in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Serving as North Africa’s original convenience food, it could either be mixed with olive oil, or with water and fruits to create a satisfying meal-shake called rowina.
The past few years living in Tunis, I started noticing new types of bsissa in shops and eateries, including gluten-free versions, and the food was becoming a regular topic of conversation. During lunch in the capital city one day, a new acquaintance told me that her mother is from Lamta, where an annual bsissa festival is held, and gave me the contact information of the festival organisers so I could learn more about why bsissa is so important to the town. When I called the number, Khairi Sassi, a young, enterprising entrepreneur, picked up and invited me to visit his family’s bsissa business.
Sassi and his family’s lives revolve around the making and selling of bsissa. In their small shop, which is crowded with shelves housing packets of bsissa powder, his father Dalel ladled out zrir – a Tunisian dessert made of sesame seeds, nuts such as hazelnuts and pine nuts, butter and honey – into plastic pots. Dalel gave me a spoon so I could dig in and taste it, which is often sold alongside bsissa as its more luxurious counterpart, while Sassi showed me all the different types of bsissa available for sale and told me about his business.
“We all work together as a family – mum, dad, my sister and me,” Sassi said. “My mum used to work in an office and hated it, so we set up the workshop and we financed it all ourselves.”
We then headed to the family’s home in a working-class seafront neighbourhood. On its ground floor was a small, modern and scrupulously clean bsissa-making workshop, where I was greeted by the smell of roasting wheat along with a warm smile and handshake from Sassi’s mother, Zahia Bousrhi. She showed me the entire process, pouring the hot roasted wheat into large metal bowls and measuring out other ingredients including chickpeas, beans, almonds and spices. Once everything is mixed, it’s packed up and taken to the local miller, who grinds it into the finished product: an unassuming looking but flavour-packed powder.
Bousrhi took me outside and pointed out the home built on top of the workshop. She said, “I built those three floors – everything good that I have comes from bsissa.”
Bsissa has been a lifeline for the Lamtiens, who have managed to develop a thriving cottage industry from it. However, it’s more than just something to eat to Tunisians. It’s also a marker of major life events such as weddings, births and moving into a new home, as well as holidays and other special occasions.
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