Senegalese · Drink
Bissap
- Easy
- 10 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with a floral thread lifting the aroma, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 70 g dried hibiscus calyces (bissap)
- 1.5 litres water
- 180 g sugar
- 1 vanilla pod, split
- 10 g fresh mint leaves (nana)
- 1 tsp orange blossom water
- pinch of salt
Equipment
Fine sieve
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rinse the calyces briefly in cold water to shift dust and grit, then drain; do not let them soak.
- Heat the water to about 90C (195F), when the base of the pan is chattering but no rolling bubbles break the surface, and take it off the heat.
- Pour the water over the calyces with the vanilla pod and steep until the liquid is a deep garnet and tastes bracingly sour, around twenty minutes.
- Strain through a sieve without pressing or wringing the calyces, then stir the sugar, salt and orange blossom water into the warm liquid until fully dissolved.
- Bruise the mint between your palms, drop it in, and chill hard. Taste again cold and adjust the sugar.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- It is the pour
- Also Right
- Serve alongside something salty and fried
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise
This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.
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