The secret behind Jordan’s national dish? A ‘yogurt that unites.’
May 30, 2023
Karak, Jordan- Shoulders aching, Um Hazem holds up in her hands a sample of the day’s labor, a fist-sized nugget of Jordan’s prized “white gold.”
“It may only be yogurt, but it is yogurt that unites us,” says the grandmother.
Sour, salty, filling, and soothing, the yogurt is the key ingredient in mansaf, a UNESCO-recognized dish that is a culinary balm for the souls of Jordanians, enjoying an undisputed status as a national symbol.
While the ancient dish is prized for its taste, it represents an important meeting point for the people of this historic Middle East crossroads. Uniting both nomadic Bedouins and sedentary villagers, it passes on generational lessons in sharing, cooperation, and respect with every serving.
At weddings and funerals, high school graduations and royal receptions, and even on lazy Fridays, the diverse peoples who call Jordan home gather around large platters of mansaf year-round.
A mound of rice or cracked wheat topped with chunks of falling-off-the-bone lamb and drizzled with a hot yogurt sauce, this three-ingredient meal has been a staple in the lands east of the Jordan River and northwest of the Arabian Peninsula for more than 2,000 years.
Ultimate team effort
The dish is a product of cooperation and coexistence between Bedouin shepherds and village farmers: The cracked wheat is from farming villages, the yogurt from the Bedouin herders’ goats and sheep.
Producing mansaf’s key ingredient is the ultimate team effort in Karak, a southern Jordanian region famous for jameed, the dehydrated sun-dried yogurt used to make the sour and salty sauce Jordanians can’t get enough of.
In the Karak village of Zahoum, the Malahmeh family works 16 hours a day, seven days a week while the spring milk season lasts.
In a rented industrial kitchen, aproned family members flutter from one giant stainless steel vat to another to churn and strain yogurt, a thicker version known as labneh, butter, and finally jameed.
Each step requires precision. One degree off on a burner or a single second without a stir can ruin an entire batch of 60 kilograms of milk, wasting a day’s work.
“Milk season means nonstop work for the whole family until June,” Hossam Malahmeh says as his wife readies a large mixer. “But all of Jordan is counting on us.”
As family members shift vats of milk through various stages of production, shepherds from the desert come knocking on the door with more churns and buckets of minutes-old sheep’s milk.
resh off a milk delivery, shepherd Abu Odeh marvels at the kitchen as he sips a glass of tea – a short break before he returns to his 200 sheep.
“The times and technology have developed over the centuries, but the rhythm of our lives is the same,” says Abu Odeh, whose herd’s milk has put two children through university. “Spring is our season, and jameed and mansaf are our livelihoods.”
Abu Odeh and other residents of the region say their jameed’s prized flavor is down to the diverse geography of Karak and much of southern and central Jordan: rolling green hills that suddenly thin out into desert plains.
The fertile hills and arid desert offer a variety of shrubs and grasses throughout the year and different climates for shepherds’ flocks, which are rotated according to grazing arrangements between Bedouins and villagers that date back centuries.