Senegal
Café Touba is Senegal's spiced coffee, roasted with Guinea pepper and cloves, then brewed strong and sweet. Its Mouride origins, its taste and how to make it.
Café Touba is named after the holy city of Touba and associated with the Mouride Sufi brotherhood, whose founder Cheikh Amadou Bamba is credited with introducing the preparation.
The spice goes in during roasting, not afterwards. Green coffee is roasted together with djar — Guinea pepper, also called Selim pepper — and often cloves, so the spice oils infuse the beans themselves.
The mixture is then ground finely together.
Peppery and aromatic rather than hot, with a distinct medicinal-floral note from the djar and a clove warmth. Brewed strong and served very sweet in small glasses.
It is unlike any other spiced coffee — the roasting integration produces something more unified than adding spice to a brew.
From large kettles at street stalls across Senegal, filtered through cloth, poured from height to aerate, and sold in small plastic cups or glasses.
It is genuinely ubiquitous — the everyday coffee of Dakar.
Grind djar with your coffee if you cannot roast together — around one part pepper to ten parts coffee, plus a few cloves. Brew strong in a French press or a cloth filter, and sweeten generously.
Its association with the Mouride brotherhood makes it a cultural marker as much as a drink.
Guinea pepper, the dried pods of Xylopia aethiopica, is sold in West African groceries in the US and online, sometimes as grains of Selim or kili pepper. It is not the same as grains of paradise, which are also called Guinea pepper; check the botanical name. Ready-made café Touba blends are also sold by Senegalese shops in cities such as New York.
The equipment this actually requires — not a shopping list, the shortest route to doing it properly.
17 oz or 34 oz · steel mesh · borosilicate glass
Full immersion, full body, and no paper to buy ever again. The cheapest genuinely good brewer here — and the one most ruined by grinding too fine.
Best for: Big-bodied dark and medium roasts, and anyone who does not want to buy papers.
39 mm (1.54 in) nitrogen-hardened burr · hand · filter & espresso
The hand grinder others are measured against, and priced accordingly. Grinds better than electric grinders at twice the money, and asks for your arm every single morning.
Best for: One or two exceptional cups a day, travel, and anyone who values the object.
