The Complete Handbook of Couscous

Chapter 1: Understanding Couscous

Couscous is not a grain, and it is not a pasta in the way you might think, and getting that distinction clear from the beginning will save you hours of experimentation. It is a manufactured food product, a form of unleavened dough made from semolina flour and water, processed into tiny granules and then dried. The essential fact is that you are buying a material that was intentionally engineered for a shelf-stable, rehydratable, steamed final texture. How it was manufactured, how the particles were formed, and what was done to them after they were formed entirely governs how that bag of dry yellow balls will behave in your kitchen.

At its most basic, couscous starts as durum wheat. Durum is the hardest wheat commercially available, and it yields a coarse flour, known as farina or semolina, that has a distinctive golden color and a high protein content. For couscous, the semolina is mixed with water and a small amount of salt, and the resulting dough is then crushed, rolled, dried, and sieved. The critical point for you, the buyer, is that all couscous is not produced the same way. Some manufacturers use a traditional method of moistening and rolling the semolina, known as agglomeration, which produces an irregular, slightly porous, and relatively soft granule. Others use a high-pressure extrusion process, often for the larger "Israeli" or "pearl" types, or they use industrial growth drums that process thousands of pounds per hour. The granulation curve - the