Sufi Spice · Peppered Street Coffee
Café Touba
Photo: EquipeTKN / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
It's named after a holy city and was kept inside a single Sufi brotherhood for nearly a century before it broke out onto every street corner in the country.
Café Touba is coffee ground together with djar (Guinea pepper/Selim), giving it a warm, peppery, almost incense-like flavor, poured theatrically between two cups to build up a foam. Street vendors sell it in small paper cups for a few cents on corners across Senegal.
Why it's made this way: It was originally brewed by followers of Sufi leader Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, and rising import coffee prices eventually pushed the whole country toward this cheaper, homegrown blend, which is now estimated to be drunk by roughly two-thirds of Senegalese.
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