How is couscous made?
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From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield. Hiya, pals! Are you ready for story time?

I've been working on this one for a while, and I think it's almost ready for our next read-aloud party at Brains on Headquarters. Last time, Molly Bloom read a story about a surprise party for elephants that made me laugh so hard I thought I was gonna barf. It's a tough act to follow. Well, here's what I've got so far. Ahem.

In a town called Spruce, there was a chef named Gustav Caboose. As you might deduce, Gustav was a goose. He was a bit of a recluse, though he could produce a mousse that made everyone let loose effusive and profuse woo-hoos. To juice up his menu, Gustav said, I choose to introduce couscous. And then that's where I get stuck. I love eating couscous, that light and fluffy stuff that goes great with stews and sauces.

But I don't actually know how to make it from scratch. So how can I describe Gustav's genius couscous cookery in my story? My friends Toby and Olivia were wondering this too. How is couscous made? Well, I think we need an assist from an expert. There are a couple of different varieties of couscous. Hey everyone, I am Kenji Lopez-Alt and I am a cookbook author and a children's book author.

So when you're talking about Moroccan couscous, which are the kinds that look like little bits of grain, they are made by hand. So you make a dough that's similar to a pasta dough, and then essentially you roll that dough very gently on a flat surface with your hand until these tiny little balls form, and those little balls are the couscous.

There's a different style of couscous, also known as Israeli couscous, which resemble more little pasta pearls. And those are made more like with a traditional pasta dough, so not quite as crumbly as a Moroccan couscous dough. And those are essentially balls of pasta that are rolled out into little spheres the same way that you might roll a ball of Play-Doh into a little sphere. Plenty of people still make couscous by hand. If you go to Morocco, you will see people making couscous by hand, and you can buy handmade couscous.

The way you would get really, really small couscous versus larger couscous is actually that as you're making the grains, you're going to end up with some grains that are much smaller and some grains that are much bigger. And so then afterwards, you can sieve them. So you can run them through a wire mesh, and that will sort out the bigger ones from the smaller ones. So you can get couscous of different sizes by sorting them after you've made them.

After couscous is made by hand, it'll be dried so that it can then be packaged and sold. So I make, you know, I'll buy the dried couscous to make at home. But couscous, you know, I love it because essentially you boil the water, you can add it to the couscous or you add the couscous into it, and then the residual heat of the water will both simultaneously steam the couscous and rehydrate it at the same time. Neat!

Couscous is made with a kind of wheat flour called semolina. You mix that flour with water to form a dough and roll it very gently with your hands to form these little balls. It's basically a tiny round ball of pasta. You can make and buy fresh couscous, but the stuff you see in boxes in the store is the dried version. Couscous probably originated in northern Africa, and it's a big part of the cuisine in places like Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Well, now that I know more, I gotta get back to Gustav Caboose and his couscous. I gotta finish this story. No excuse! No excuse!

If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you love to chat about food, check out the Smash Boom Best podcast where we have a whole episode debating the merits of donuts versus bagels. Want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes. Search Brains On Universe on YouTube and subscribe.

And if you have a question, we would love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then. All right. The story of Gustav Caboose and his famous couscous is done. Gotta famoose. I could do this all day.

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