Couscous: a dish that tastes good at any time
Cape Verde is full of peculiarities, especially when it comes to cuisine. Today, cabo.verde.com introduces you to Cape Verde’s famous couscous.
A versatile dish that can be eaten at any time of day. It can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack or dinner too.
Couscous is always served with milk, honey or both, or when it’s nice and warm, you can add butter and eat it. Many locals like this dish precisely because it is made from corn flour – which makes anyone feel full very quickly.
Follow the description below to find out how to prepare this quick and easy dish:
To make couscous, you buy a kilo of corn flour and add it to a bowl. We’ve opened a parenthesis here to say that it can also be made with wheat flour, but traditionally it’s always made with corn flour, and it’s much better. After putting the flour in a bowl, add the mashed potato and mix and gradually pour in the cold water. If you like, you can also add sugar or cinnamon to the flour.
The technique for making couscous dough is always the same: you make a circulating motion with the palms of your hands until the flour becomes a little damp. Next, you place the marinara in a traditional container suitable for couscous called a “binde”, or you place it in another utensil called a “maminha”. In both utensils, couscous is made to perfection.
When you add the prepared couscous flour to the binde, you must close all the holes in the binde with the flour. Then place a lid on top of the binde, which can be a plate. The binde is then placed over a bowl with water in it. The bowl should be a size that fits snugly into the toast.
The couscous flour should also be placed around the binde, where there is a separation between the binde and the container of water, so that there is no space for air to enter.
As for the maminha, which is a small aluminum utensil (it came about as an alternative to the binde, which is large), the couscous flour is placed on the top and bought with a lid that is part of the utensil, and water is placed on the bottom.
Then, in both cases, just wait for the cooking time, which isn’t long. To know if the couscous is ready, just watch the smoke coming out of the top, which it is. Then just place the couscous on a plate. After being served, couscous can be stored in the fridge or cut into pieces and left in the sun until hard (which makes it last longer), then stored in the kitchen.
It should be noted that although couscous is made on another island, the island of Santiago is the one that still has this strong tradition of making couscous. So much so that couscous is also a tradition at ash lunches, which is religiously celebrated only on the island of Santiago, where it takes place every year.
On this day of ashes, the presence of couscous and sugarcane honey is always guaranteed, and in many homes, bread isn’t even bought on the day the ashes are celebrated, since couscous is the main dish for breakfast, and after the famous lunch, it is eaten as dessert.
