Street Coffee Ritual · Ginger-Spiced Jebena Brew
Sudanese Coffee (Gahwa)
Photo: Nsfcom / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
The coffee is poured through a filter of dried grass, not paper or metal, and it's almost always brewed and sold by a street vendor known as a sitt al-shai, not in a café.
Sudanese coffee is slow-roasted, pounded with cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves, then simmered in a long-necked clay pot called a jebena and strained into tiny cups. It's sold from low wooden stools set up on Khartoum's sidewalks by women vendors, alongside spiced tea, and drunk standing or seated on a shared bench.
Why it's made this way: The jebena ritual traces through Sudan's old trade routes to the Horn of Africa and remains one of the country's enduring public social spaces, run almost entirely by women street vendors.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries.
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