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Associated Press

For years, Tunisians have been picking bright red peppers, combining them with garlic, vinegar and spices and turning them into a saucy spread called harissa.
The condiment is a national staple, found in homes, restaurants and food stalls throughout the coastal North African nation.
Brick-red, spicy and tangy, it can be scooped up on bread drizzled with olive oil or dabbed onto plates of eggs, fish, stews or sandwiches.
Harissa can be sprinkled atop merguez sausages, smeared on savoury pastries called brik or sandwiches called fricassees.

In Nabeul, the largest city in Tunisia’s harissa-producing Cap Bon region, local chef and harissa specialist Chahida Boufayed calls it “essential to Tunisian cuisine”.
“Harissa is a love story,” she says at a festival held in honour of the chilli paste sauce in the northeastern Tunisian city of Nabeul earlier in January. “I don’t make it for the money.”
Aficionados from across Tunisia and the world converged on the 43-year-old mother’s stand to try her recipe.
Surrounded by strings of drying baklouti red peppers, she described how she grows her vegetables and blends them with spices to make harissa.
Making harissa is an art. If you master it, you can create wonders
Chahida Boufayed, a Tunisian harissa maker
The region’s annual harissa festival has grown in the two-plus years since the United Nations cultural organisation, Unesco, recognised the sauce on a list of items of intangible cultural heritage, says Zouheir Belamin, the president of the association behind the event.
He says its growing prominence worldwide was attracting new tourists to Tunisia, specifically to Nabeul.
Unesco in 2022 called harissa “an integral part of domestic provisions and the daily culinary and food traditions of Tunisian society”, adding it to a list of traditions and practices that mark intangible cultural heritage including Ukrainian borscht and Cuban rum.

Already popular across North Africa as well as in France, the condiment is gaining popularity throughout the world from the United States to China.
Seen as sriracha’s North African cousin, harissa is typically prepared by women, who sun-dry harvested red peppers and then deseed, wash and grind them.
Its name comes from haras – the Arabic verb for “to crush” – because of the next stage in the process.

The finished peppers are combined with a mixture of garlic cloves, vinegar, salt, olive oil and spices in a mortar and pestle to make a fragrant blend.
Variants on display at Nabeul’s festival used cumin, coriander and different spice blends or types of peppers, including smoked ones, to create pastes ranging in colour from burgundy to crimson.
“Making harissa is an art. If you master it, you can create wonders,” Boufayed says.


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A Tunisian harissa maker at work in her home. Photo: AP

Harissa, a chilli paste that’s a staple of meals in Tunisia, is known as sriracha’s North African cousin. Harissa specialist Chahida Boufaied makes some of the spicy spread, which is growing in popularity around the world. Photo: AP


Harissa specialist Chahida Boufaied prepares the condiment – made with peppers, garlic, vinegar and spices – at her home in Nabeul, Tunisia. Photo: AP

People enjoy Nabeul’s harissa festival, which has grown since Unesco listed the sauce as an item of intangible cultural heritage more than two years ago. Photo: ASVN Nabeul via AP

Boufaied holds baklouti red peppers, the main ingredient of harissa. The spicy spread gets its name from the Arabic verb meaning “to crush”. Photo: AP

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Food & Drink

The Unesco-listed condiment seen as sriracha’s North African relative is growing in popularity, as is a festival devoted to it in Tunisia


The Unesco-listed condiment seen as sriracha’s North African relative is growing in popularity, as is a festival devoted to it in Tunisia.


Africa