Recipes

Boeber, a Cape Malay sweet milk drink from South Africa, served warm with slivered almonds

Boeber (Cape Malay Sweet Milk Drink)

Boeber is a Cape Malay sweet milk drink, thick with vermicelli and sago and scented with cardamom, cinnamon and rose water. It sits somewhere between a drink and a pudding, and Cape Town households do not find the ambiguity a problem. Its place in the calendar is precise. Boeber is served on the fifteenth night of Ramadan, marking the midpoint of the fast for those who have completed the first fifteen days. That single fixed date gives it a weight that a dish eaten year round does not carry: it belongs to a moment, and its appearance signals that the moment has arrived. The drink comes from the Cape Malay community, whose ancestors were brought to the Cape from Indonesia, India and East Africa, and boeber carries the marks of all three. It has close relatives across that map. Malaysians break the fast with bubur lambuk, a porridge; Trinidadian households serve sawine at Eid al-Fitr; kheer and payasam on the Indian subcontinent are its nearest kin, most likely carried to the Cape by enslaved and later indentured Indians. In South Africa itself, the Afrikaans melkkos is the comparable dish. Boeber is what all of those became in one place.

South Africa55 minJennifer

Papaya smoothie in a glass, blended with banana, yogurt and chia seeds

Papaya Smoothie for Weight Loss

Papaya, known as pawpaw across most of anglophone West and East Africa, grows in nearly every tropical African country and in a great many household compounds. It is not a market luxury. A pawpaw tree fruits within a year of planting and keeps fruiting, which is why it turns up at the edge of yards from Lagos to Mombasa and why the fruit is understood as something you have rather than something you buy. Ripe pawpaw is eaten fresh and cold, most often at breakfast, cut into halves or wedges with a squeeze of lime. The lime is not decoration; it sharpens a fruit whose sweetness is soft and slightly musky and which can read as flat without acid. That pairing is the reference point this drink is built on. This particular recipe is a contemporary blended drink rather than a dish with a documented lineage. It belongs to the global category of fruit smoothies made for a health purpose, and it uses pawpaw as its base because pawpaw blends to an unusually smooth, thick texture without any thickener at all. The fruit is African by cultivation and by everyday use rather than by origin.

10 minDebby

Amasi, South African fermented milk, served thick in a calabash with a wooden spoon

Amasi Recipe

Amasi is fermented milk, thick and sharply sour, and it is one of the oldest things eaten in southern Africa. Unpasteurised cow's milk is left to ferment until it separates into a watery liquid called umlaza and the thick curd that is amasi itself, and the separation is the process rather than a fault in it. It carries names in most of the region's languages: amasi in isiZulu and isiXhosa, maas in Afrikaans, mafi in Sesotho, magege in Xitsonga. That spread of names across unrelated language families is a reliable indication of how long and how widely a food has been eaten. Amasi is associated particularly with Zulu and Xhosa households, where it was made in a calabash or a hide bag and served in a clay pot with wooden spoons. Its usual place is over pap. The sour milk against the neutral maize is a pairing that predates any of the dairy products it now sits beside on a supermarket shelf, and it remains an everyday South African food rather than a revived one. Commercial maas is sold nationally, which has changed how it is obtained without much changing what it is.

South Africa31 hrJennifer

Umqombothi

Umqombothi is Xhosa beer, brewed from maize meal, maize malt and sorghum malt. It is thick, cloudy, sour smelling and low in alcohol, usually under three per cent, and it is not made to be compared with lager. It is a different category of drink with a different purpose. Its purpose is ceremonial before it is social. In Xhosa practice umqombothi is brewed for the return of the abakwetha, the young men coming back from ulwaluko, the initiation and circumcision rite. It is central when families communicate with the amadlozi, the ancestors, and it appears at traditional weddings, funerals and imbizo, the community meetings where matters are decided. A gathering of consequence has umqombothi at it, and its absence would be noticed as a statement. The drink is not confined to South Africa. Sorghum beer is brewed across the continent under many names: dolo in Burkina Faso, pito in Nigeria, ingwebu among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe, which is their word for froth. Brewing is done outdoors over an open fire, cooled at ambient temperature, and the recipes are held within families and passed down rather than written.

South Africa3 days 1 hrJennifer

Djablani

Djablani is a Malian drink of ginger, lemon and baobab, served cold and sharply flavoured. It belongs to the family of fresh homemade drinks sold in bags and bottles across West Africa, alongside bissap made from hibiscus and dakar made from tamarind, prepared in quantity in households and sold by the roadside. The baobab is what places it. The tree grows across the Sahel and is one of the defining plants of the Malian landscape, distinctive in shape, able to survive extreme heat and poor soil, and long lived on a scale that has made it a landmark in its own right. Its fruit gives a pale tart pulp used in drinks and porridges across the region, and its leaves are dried and ground for soup. Ginger carries the rest. West African ginger drinks are made strong, and the heat in a properly made djablani is genuine rather than suggested, which is what the sugar and the lemon are there to balance. It is served cold, often with mint, and it is refreshment in a climate where that word means something specific. Fresh drinks of this kind are a category of their own in West African hospitality: made at home, given to guests, and sold cheaply on the street.

Mali15 minDeborah

Bissap

Bissap is the Wolof name for Hibiscus sabdariffa and for the deep red drink made from its dried calyces. It is the most widely drunk thing in Senegal after water, sold from every restaurant, supermarket and street corner, and made at home by buying the dried flowers at the market and steeping them in hot water with sugar. Its position has something to do with religion. Senegal is overwhelmingly Muslim, alcohol plays almost no part in social life, and the result is a genuinely developed culture of non alcoholic drinks: bissap alongside ginger, tamarind and bouye, made from the fruit of the baobab. These are not soft drinks in the Western sense of an afterthought. They are what people offer guests and what they drink at any hour. The same flower is drunk across a great deal of the world under other names: zobo in Nigeria, sorrel in the Caribbean, karkade in Egypt and Sudan, agua de jamaica in Mexico. What varies is the flavouring. Senegalese bissap commonly carries mint, and ginger, pineapple, passion fruit and lime all appear. Ginger divides opinion, since a heavy hand overpowers the hibiscus. It is served very cold and generally over ice, which is not a preference but a requirement in the climate it belongs to.

SenegalBlessing

Tigernut drink, a creamy Nigerian kunun aya served cold over ice with cinnamon

Tigernut Drink (Kunun Aya)

Tigernuts are not nuts. They are the small tubers of Cyperus esculentus, a sedge, and they have been eaten for a very long time: they were cultivated along the Nile and have been found in Egyptian tombs, which places them among the oldest documented foods on the continent. In Nigeria the drink made from them is kunun aya, a Hausa preparation from the north, where tigernuts are soaked, blended with dates or coconut and sometimes ginger, and strained into a sweet, creamy, faintly nutty drink. It is sold in bottles and bags across northern Nigeria and increasingly across the country, and it belongs to the same family of kunu drinks as kunun zaki and kunun gyada. The tuber also travelled. It spread through the Mediterranean and reached the Iberian peninsula under the Moors, where Valencia developed horchata de chufa, which is the same drink under a Spanish name and is now better known internationally than its African relative. The source for this recipe tells that Spanish story at length and never mentions kunun aya, which is a reasonable illustration of how African foods often reach the world labelled as something else.

Nigeria50 minLaila

Zobo Drink

Zobo is the Nigerian name for a deep red infusion made from dried hibiscus calyces, and it is one of the few drinks that crosses every line in the country, sold from coolers at motor parks, poured at weddings, made at home in large jugs and kept cold for whoever passes through. The same flower travels under different names almost everywhere it is drunk. In Senegal and much of francophone West Africa it is bissap. In Ghana it is sobolo. Across the Caribbean it is sorrel, carried there through the Atlantic trade and now inseparable from Christmas. In Egypt it is karkade. The plant is Hibiscus sabdariffa, and what is steeped is not the petal but the calyx, the fleshy cup left behind after the flower falls. What varies from house to house is what goes in beside it. Ginger and cloves are near universal in the Nigerian version. Beyond that the argument is open, pineapple skin, garden egg leaf, cucumber, lemongrass, a stick of cinnamon. Sweetness is the real dividing line: purists take it plain and tart, while most drinkers add sugar or fruit juice until it turns almost like a cordial. It is caffeine-free, which is part of why it is poured for everyone including children, and it holds its colour for days in the fridge.

NigeriaBeatrice

Palm Fruit Juice

Palm fruit juice is not a drink despite the name. It is the thick orange extract pressed from the flesh of the palm fruit, and it is the base ingredient of an entire family of West African soups including banga, ofe akwu and abak atama. Getting it right is the difference between those soups working and not. It is distinct from palm oil, which comes from the same fruit. Palm oil is the extracted fat, thin and deep red. Palm fruit juice is the whole pulp suspended in water, thicker, more substantial and carrying the fruit's flavour rather than just its fat. Substituting one for the other is the single most common error people make with these soups, and it produces something oily and thin instead of rich and full. Extraction is manual and physical, and it is the reason the ingredient is more often bought than made. Softening the fruit, pounding it in a mortar and working the pulp free of its fibre and nuts is close to an hour's labour before any soup has been begun. Across Nigeria it was and in many households still is done by hand, and tinned concentrate exists precisely because the process is so laborious. Fresh extract freezes for three months, which is what most people do who go to the trouble.

Nigeria1 hr 5 minSobecooks

West African Groundnut Milk in a glass, a creamy homemade peanut milk drink from Ghana and the Sahelian belt of West Africa

Groundnut (Peanut) Milk

Groundnut milk is what you get when raw peanuts are soaked, blended with water and strained, a plant milk made from one of West Africa's most important crops, using a method that predates the shelves of alternative milks now sold everywhere. The groundnut itself is not originally African. It came from South America and arrived through Portuguese trade, but it settled into West African farming and cooking so completely that it is now difficult to think of the region's food without it. Groundnut stew, kuli kuli, suya's spice base, roasted nuts sold by the cup at every junction, the crop runs right through the cuisine, and milk is one more thing done with it. It is drunk for straightforward reasons. It contains no dairy, which matters in a region where lactose intolerance is common in adults, and it is made from something cheap and locally grown rather than imported. Flavourings are a matter of household preference: vanilla, a little sugar, sometimes cinnamon or dates. The one thing it demands is that you make what you will drink. Fresh groundnut milk has nothing preserving it and separates within a day or two, so it is made in small quantities rather than stored, which is why it tends to be a morning thing, made and finished. It should be shaken before pouring; separation is normal, not spoilage.

NigeriaAmara

Pineapple, Turmeric and Ginger Juice

This is a cold pressed juice of pineapple, fresh turmeric root and fresh ginger root, and the source names no country for it. All three ingredients are grown and widely used across West and East Africa, and ginger and turmeric in particular are staples of Ghanaian and Nigerian kitchens, but the drink as written is not attached to a documented tradition. What it does have is a clear method: everything goes through a slow juicer rather than a blender. That distinction matters. A slow, or masticating, juicer crushes and presses, separating the juice from the fibre and generating very little heat, which keeps the colour bright and the flavour clean. A high speed blender leaves the pulp in and produces a thick smoothie instead. Turmeric and ginger are both rhizomes, closely related, and both stain heavily. Fresh turmeric will colour a plastic juicer, a chopping board and your hands a vivid yellow that takes days to fade. The juice keeps a week or two refrigerated in airtight glass bottles, which is longer than most fresh juices manage, and the ginger is doing much of that work. Because no country is claimed in the source, none is claimed here.

20 minRashidatu Alhassan

Bouye juice, a Senegalese drink made from soaked baobab fruit pulp

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Bouye is the Wolof name for the fruit of the baobab, and bouye juice is what Senegal makes from it. The fruit hangs in hard woody pods on the most recognisable tree of the African savannah, and inside is a dry, chalky white pulp with a distinctly sour, citrus-like flavour. Baobab has been a staple across the Sahel for centuries, in Senegal and well beyond, and every part of the tree gets used: leaves as a vegetable and thickener, seeds pressed for oil, bark for rope. The English name for the fruit, monkey bread, describes the pulp reasonably well. In Hausa the fruit is kwalba, which is the name that appears in this particular recipe. The method is soaking rather than juicing. The pulp is left in water for around an hour to soften, worked with a whisk to release as much as possible, then strained. What happens next varies: drunk plain and sweetened it is bouye juice, while blending it with nono, the fermented milk of northern Nigeria and the Sahel, or with yoghurt, gives the thicker milkshake version this recipe describes. Both are drunk cold, and it freezes into ice lollies, which is how children across the region most often have it.

Senegal1 hr 10 minBlessing

Nigerian Chapman

Chapman is Nigeria's best known mixed drink, a deep red fruity cooler served in dimpled beer mugs at parties, bars and restaurants across the country. It is made from two soft drinks, grenadine syrup, cucumber, citrus and mint, and it is as common at a Lagos owambe as jollof rice. Whether it is alcohol free depends entirely on how it is made, and this matters more than most people assume. Angostura bitters is a standard ingredient and is around 45 percent alcohol by volume. The quantity used is small, so the finished drink is only very lightly alcoholic, but it is not a true mocktail unless the bitters are left out, which is what is done when it is served to children. The cucumber is not garnish. Sliced into the jug it releases a cool, faintly vegetal note that cuts the sweetness of the two soft drinks and the grenadine, and a chapman without it tastes markedly flatter. The other detail worth following is freezing soft drink into the ice cubes rather than using water ice, so the drink does not dilute as it stands, which matters at a party where a jug sits out.

Nigeria10 minJennifer

Mazagran

Mazagran is strong coffee poured over ice with lemon and sugar, and it has a fair claim to being the original iced coffee. It takes its name from Mazagran in Algeria, and it is Algerian in origin even though it is now far better known in Portugal. The lemon has a practical history. It was added to improve the flavour of low quality coffee beans, which is a origin story shared by a good many drinks, and it turned out to make something worth drinking in its own right. The combination of citrus acidity against the bitterness of strong coffee is what the drink is, and good beans are not wasted on it. It is traditionally served in a tall narrow glass, and there is an eponymous porcelain or clay vessel of the same name. The Portuguese version is the one most people encounter, sometimes made with espresso and lemon, sometimes with rum added. The recipe here is a Nespresso-branded version, which is worth noting: it specifies particular capsules, and any strong espresso or very strong brewed coffee substitutes. What it does not include, oddly, is the lemon that the article itself identifies as the defining ingredient.

Algeria5 minBlessing

Papaya Juice

Papaya juice is ripe pawpaw blended with water and served cold, one of the simplest tropical fruit drinks, and one made wherever the fruit grows, which across Africa is very widely. Pawpaw is the name used across much of anglophone West Africa for what is sold elsewhere as papaya. The tree grows quickly and fruits generously in warm climates, and in many households it is not bought at all but picked, which shapes how the juice is used, it is a way of dealing with fruit that has ripened all at once rather than a recipe planned in advance. The flesh is orange, soft and sweet with a faint musky edge that some people love and others temper with lime. Lime is the standard correction, and it does two things: it lifts the sweetness and it cuts the muskiness that can otherwise dominate. The fruit carries papain, an enzyme that breaks down protein. It is the reason unripe pawpaw is used as a meat tenderiser across West Africa, and it is also why papaya is commonly associated with digestion. It does not keep. Blended pawpaw separates and dulls within hours, so it is made and drunk rather than stored, and it is best served very cold.

Debby

Tamarind Juice

Tamarind juice is made by soaking the pulp of the tamarind pod in water, working it loose from the seeds and fibre, straining it and sweetening to taste. It is sharp, dark and genuinely refreshing, and it is drunk across a very wide stretch of the world. The tree is African. Tamarindus indica is indigenous to tropical Africa and grows wild across Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Somalia, Tanzania and Malawi. It has been cultivated on the Indian subcontinent for so long that it is frequently reported as native there, and India is now among the largest producers, but the origin is African, and the confusion is a good example of how completely a crop can be absorbed somewhere it did not begin. The fruit is a long pod with a brittle brown shell. Inside is a sticky, dark, intensely sour pulp packed around hard seeds. That pulp is what everything is made from: the juice, and also the souring agent used across African, Indian and Southeast Asian cooking. It is drunk across the Sahel under a range of names, and in West Africa it is a standard hot-weather drink sold alongside zobo and other cold infusions. Sweetening is essential rather than optional. Unsweetened tamarind is bracingly sour.

Cuisine228

Moroccan Mint Tea

Moroccan mint tea is green tea infused with spearmint and heavily sweetened, and in Morocco it is not simply a drink. It is a sign of hospitality and friendship, served all day, after every meal and through every conversation, and Moroccans take enough pride in it to argue over who among their friends makes the best cup. Its history is more recent and more accidental than most people expect. Tea reached Morocco in quantity through the Crimean War in the 1850s, when the British East India Company diverted shipments intended for the Baltic states and found itself with a surplus of Chinese tea to sell. Moroccans were the first to infuse it with mint, as a way of countering the bitterness of gunpowder green tea, and the combination stuck. It is drunk across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, and in parts of the Near and Middle East. It is called shai bi na'na' in classical Arabic and atay or latay in Maghrebi Arabic. The method here involves two rinses of the tea leaves before the tea is made, one of which is kept as the essence and returned to the pot, and one discarded. That step is what removes the harshest bitterness while keeping the strength.

Morocco20 minBlessing

Cucumber Mint Agua Fresca

Agua fresca is a chilled non-alcoholic drink popular in Mexico and Central America, made by blending fruit, soaked grains or steeped blossoms with water and a little sweetener. The name translates as fresh water or cool water, and this is the cucumber and mint version. It is Latin American rather than African. The source notes that similar drinks are available across many African countries, which is true in the sense that blended fruit coolers are made everywhere hot, but agua fresca is a specific Mexican and Central American tradition with a Spanish name. It sits in Worldwide Recipes for that reason, with its URL unchanged. Africa has its own cold blended drinks that this is not: zobo and bissap from hibiscus across West Africa, kunun zaki from fermented millet in northern Nigeria, bouye from baobab in Senegal, and tigernut milk. Each has its own name and tradition. One practical point about this recipe: gin appears in its ingredient list, which the prose presents as an optional way to turn the drink into an aperitif. That makes it alcoholic as written rather than the non-alcoholic drink agua fresca normally is, and it should be left out for the classic version.

15 minBeatrice

Strawberry and watermelon juice served chilled over ice

Strawberry Watermelon Juice

Strawberries and watermelon blended together, sweetened lightly and chilled. There is no country attached to it and none is implied, it is a two-fruit juice, and its appeal is the pairing rather than any tradition. The combination works for a straightforward reason. Watermelon is more than nine-tenths water and its sweetness is mild and slightly vegetal, which makes it refreshing but thin on its own. Strawberries are far more aromatic and carry a gentle acidity. Put together, the strawberry supplies the flavour and the tartness that watermelon lacks, and the watermelon supplies the volume and the cooling quality that a pure strawberry juice would not have. The colour, a deep pink, comes from both. Whether it needs sweetening at all depends entirely on the fruit. A ripe summer watermelon and properly ripe strawberries need nothing; out-of-season fruit needs help, which is why the honey is written as optional. Africa has a long and varied tradition of fruit drinks, bissap from hibiscus, tamarind juice, tigernut drink, palm wine, and several of them are on this site. This is not one of them, and it sits in Worldwide Recipes accordingly, with its URL unchanged.

10 minDebby

Egyptian Sobia cold coconut and rice drink in a glass with ice, a creamy sweetened Egyptian summer beverage

Egyptian Sobia Drink

Sobia is a cold, sweet, milky-white Egyptian drink made from soaked rice blended with coconut and milk, strained and chilled. It belongs to Ramadan almost entirely. Through the fasting month it is sold from carts and shops across Egypt in tall chilled bottles, and it is one of the drinks people break their fast with, sweet, cold and filling after a day without food or water. Outside Ramadan it largely disappears. The method is a soaking one rather than a cooking one. Rice is ground fine and left in water for several hours, which draws out the starch and gives the drink its body. That starchy rice water is then blended with coconut milk, powdered milk, sugar and vanilla, strained, and chilled thoroughly. The result is thicker than a flavoured milk and thinner than a smoothie, with a gentle coconut fragrance and a soft white colour that gives it its name. It shares an idea with horchata, the Spanish and Mexican drink made from soaked rice or tiger nuts, though the two developed separately and taste quite different. Serve very cold, lukewarm sobia is unpleasant.

EgyptBlessing

Ginger, Lemon and Mint Juice

Fresh ginger blended with lemon juice and mint, strained, sweetened with honey and diluted with water. No country is named in the source. Ginger drinks are made across West Africa and the drink here sits comfortably in that company, Nigerian and Ghanaian ginger drinks, often fermented and spiced, are everyday refreshments, and ginger appears throughout the region's cooking. The version here is simpler and unfermented: blend, strain, sweeten, dilute. It is closer to a fresh juice than to the traditional spiced brews. The straining step is what makes it drinkable. Ginger is intensely fibrous, and blended ginger that has not been strained is unpleasant to drink however good the flavour. Pressing the solids in the sieve with a spoon extracts a surprising amount of additional liquid, which is worth doing. Adjust the dilution to taste. Five parts water to the blended base is a starting point rather than a rule, and raw ginger in quantity is genuinely fierce. **A note on the source.** It makes extensive medical claims, that the drink boosts immunity, supports heart health, manages blood sugar, detoxifies the liver and reduces muscle soreness. None of that has been carried across. It is a sharp, refreshing drink, which is a good enough reason to make it.

20 minDebby

Homemade lemonade with lemon slices and ice

Homemade Fermented Lemonade

Lemon juice, sugar syrup and water, with raisins left in overnight to start a light fermentation and give the drink a natural fizz. No country is claimed. The raisins are the interesting part, and the source rather buries them. Dried fruit carries wild yeasts on its skin; left in a sweet liquid at room temperature, those yeasts begin converting sugar into carbon dioxide, which is what produces the fizz. This is the same principle behind ginger beer plants and a great many traditional home-fermented drinks, and it is why the method says to leave it overnight rather than serving immediately. Two consequences follow, and neither is in the source. Fermentation produces a small amount of alcohol alongside the carbon dioxide, usually well under one per cent for an overnight ferment, but not zero. And a fermenting drink in a sealed container builds pressure, so it should be left loosely covered rather than tightly capped. The source's history is muddled. It dates lemonade to Paris around 1630, which refers specifically to the French *limonade* sold by the Compagnie des Limonadiers; sweetened lemon drinks are considerably older and are documented in medieval Egypt. No quantities are given at all; those below are working proportions.

20 minBeatrice

Jebena, Sudanese coffee brewed in a clay pot with spices

Jebena (Sudanese Spiced Coffee)

Green coffee beans roasted, ground with spices and brewed in a clay pot, then poured through a filter of palm fibre. It is Sudanese, and it is a preparation rather than simply a drink. **This page had no recipe card in the source.** The ingredients and method below are reconstructed from its article, and that is flagged. The context is worth stating. Coffee is East African in origin, Ethiopia is where *Coffea arabica* comes from, and Sudan and Kenya are among the places where it was first used. That makes Sudanese coffee culture not an import but part of the plant's home ground, and the source is right to be proud of it. What distinguishes jebena is that the whole process happens at the point of serving. Beans are roasted fresh in a pan, ground by hand, traditionally in a mortar, with ginger, cardamom and sometimes cloves or cinnamon, and brewed in the clay jebena pot the drink is named after. It is then poured through a filter of palm fibre stuffed in the spout. The source contradicts itself in a single sentence, saying the coffee is brewed very sweet and then that it is served black with no sugar. Both practices exist; the sentence as written cannot be true.

Sudan30 minNympha

A cup of red rooibos tea brewed from South African red bush leaves

Rooibos Tea (Red Bush Tea)

Rooibos leaves brewed in water and served with or without milk. It is South African, and it is one of very few plants used as a tea that grows nowhere else on earth. Rooibos means red bush in Afrikaans, and the plant, *Aspalathus linearis*, grows only in the Cederberg, a small mountainous area of the Western Cape. Attempts to cultivate it elsewhere have consistently failed, which makes it genuinely unusual: not a plant that happens to be associated with a region but one that is confined to it. The European Union granted it protected designation of origin status in 2021, the first African food to receive it. It is not tea in the botanical sense. Rooibos contains no *Camellia sinensis* and therefore no caffeine at all, and it has very little tannin, which is why it does not turn bitter however long it brews. That is the practical difference: black tea over-steeped becomes astringent, rooibos simply becomes stronger. Red rooibos is oxidised after harvest, which is what produces the colour and the sweeter, fuller flavour. Green rooibos is unoxidised, lighter and more expensive. The source's health claims have not been carried across.

South Africa20 minJennifer

Sahlab, a warm thickened milk drink topped with cinnamon and pistachios

Sahlab (Warm Milk Pudding Drink)

Sahlab is warm thickened milk, scented and topped with cinnamon, nuts and coconut. It is drunk across Egypt, the Levant and Turkey in winter, in much the same way hot chocolate is drunk elsewhere. Its name comes from an ingredient this recipe does not contain, and that needs saying plainly. True sahlab is thickened with salep, flour ground from the dried tubers of wild orchids, which gives a distinctive stretchy, slightly chewy texture that nothing else reproduces. Harvesting it requires digging up wild orchids, and the pressure on those populations has been severe enough that Turkey now bans the export of salep outright. Cornflour, which this recipe uses, is the standard modern substitute, and it is what almost all commercial and home versions now use. That makes this a good drink under a name that historically meant something else, which is worth knowing rather than papering over. The one instruction that matters is not to leave the pan. Milk thickened with cornflour catches on the base very readily and scorched milk taints the whole batch. The source repeats a claim that the Romans used orchid drinks as an aphrodisiac. That is recorded as folklore rather than fact.

25 minBlessing

Recipes

Mazagran

Nigerian Chapman

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Pineapple, Turmeric and Ginger Juice

Homemade Fermented Lemonade

Ginger, Lemon and Mint Juice

Egyptian Sobia Drink

Strawberry Watermelon Juice

Groundnut (Peanut) Milk

Palm Fruit Juice

Landmark Dishes

Most Popular Recipes

Boeber (Cape Malay Sweet Milk Drink)

Papaya Smoothie for Weight Loss

Amasi Recipe

Umqombothi

Djablani

Bissap

Tigernut Drink (Kunun Aya)

Zobo Drink

Palm Fruit Juice

Groundnut (Peanut) Milk

Pineapple, Turmeric and Ginger Juice

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Nigerian Chapman

Mazagran

Papaya Juice

Tamarind Juice

Moroccan Mint Tea

Cucumber Mint Agua Fresca

Strawberry Watermelon Juice

Egyptian Sobia Drink

Ginger, Lemon and Mint Juice

Homemade Fermented Lemonade

Jebena (Sudanese Spiced Coffee)

Rooibos Tea (Red Bush Tea)

Sahlab (Warm Milk Pudding Drink)

Recipes

Featured recipes

Mazagran

Homemade Fermented Lemonade

Ginger, Lemon and Mint Juice

Egyptian Sobia Drink

Strawberry Watermelon Juice

Groundnut (Peanut) Milk

Palm Fruit Juice

Landmark Dishes

Most Popular Recipes

Boeber (Cape Malay Sweet Milk Drink)

Papaya Smoothie for Weight Loss

Amasi Recipe

Umqombothi

Djablani

Bissap

Tigernut Drink (Kunun Aya)

Zobo Drink

Palm Fruit Juice

Groundnut (Peanut) Milk

Pineapple, Turmeric and Ginger Juice

Bouye Juice (Baobab Drink)

Nigerian Chapman

Mazagran

Papaya Juice

Tamarind Juice

Moroccan Mint Tea

Cucumber Mint Agua Fresca

Strawberry Watermelon Juice

Egyptian Sobia Drink

Ginger, Lemon and Mint Juice

Homemade Fermented Lemonade

Jebena (Sudanese Spiced Coffee)

Rooibos Tea (Red Bush Tea)

Sahlab (Warm Milk Pudding Drink)