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Egyptian Restaurant Serves Unconventional Sandwiches

Tourists are seen next to a meal made by Saqqara residents, who sell food to improve their living conditions in thier village, in Giza, Egypt, on April 27, 2021. REUTERS/Shokry Hussien
Tourists are seen next to a meal made by Saqqara residents, who sell food to improve their living conditions in thier village, in Giza, Egypt, on April 27, 2021. REUTERS/Shokry Hussien
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Egyptian Restaurant Serves Unconventional Sandwiches

Tourists are seen next to a meal made by Saqqara residents, who sell food to improve their living conditions in thier village, in Giza, Egypt, on April 27, 2021. REUTERS/Shokry Hussien
Tourists are seen next to a meal made by Saqqara residents, who sell food to improve their living conditions in thier village, in Giza, Egypt, on April 27, 2021. REUTERS/Shokry Hussien

In a step toward innovation and breaking the traditional, an Egyptian restaurant is serving unconventional “sandwiches”, offering its customers the chance to try diverse tastes including the meat of pigeons, ostriches, and ducks.

Located in the Nasr City, eastern Cairo, the Zouzou Restaurant, which is set to open a new branch in the October City, promotes its special sandwiches, their ingredients, and how they are prepared with videos on its official Facebook page.

The restaurant serves duck and turkey shawarma prepared in the same traditional way with onion, tomato, pepper, hot pepper, spices, and various sauces, but served in local bread. Shawarma choices are many and satisfy all tastes with new flavors, including pastrami, sausage, and traditional meat shawarma.

The “Hawawshi” sandwich are served with a twist as well; the best kind is “Hawawshi Zouzou”, a mix of spinach, mushroom, and smoked beef. There are also the pastrami hawawshi, hamburger, and local sausage. Turkey or liver hawawshi are also available in different sizes, including the ‘mini’ hawawshi of pastrami, liver, or sausage stuffing accompanied with different kinds of cheese such as mozzarella.

The idea of the restaurant consists of serving unfamiliar sandwiches made of meats that customers are used to eat in different ways.

“The restaurant is trying to change the old typical view of protein consumption by serving it in the form of “sandwich”. Eating pigeons or ducks doesn’t require a table and many utensils anymore. Now, you can eat it in a new, easy way,” Amro al-Soubki, manager of the Zouzou restaurant, told Asharq Al-Awsat.

For more innovation, the restaurant has reintroduced some of its most popular dishes with different “stuffing” choices, like the turkey shawarma sandwich seasoned with coriander and pineapple sauce; or the duck shawarma soaked in sweet orange juice, dill, honey mustard sauce, and tahini.

Alongside the non-traditional sandwiches, the Zouzou restaurant is experimenting with Tajines. It serves ostriches tajin, which according to the chef, “helps reduce blood cholesterol, and address many digestif problems.” “Ostrich meat is highly demanded because they are cooked fresh, right after the slaughter,” he added.

Tawouk has a share of innovation too. At the Zouzou restaurant, Tawouk is made of duck, or turkey soaked in yogurt, herbs, and spices. Among the other unfamiliar plates served at Zouzou are the ostrich steak and “mumbar” bites (mumbar are ‘animal intestines’ cleaned and stuffed with rice, spices, and tomato juice, then cut and fried).

“Serving protein in a sandwich has opened the door for more innovations that we will launch soon, including the ‘veal akawi’. Although ostrich meat is expensive and not so popular in Egypt, it’s among the most demanded plates, alongside hawawshi and shawarma,” said Soubki.

In addition to the popular, traditional shawarma, the restaurant also serves the pastrami shawarma with sliced olive and cheese mix, as well as shawarma of sausage, smoked beef, or mushroom and other types of vegetables like spinach.

Egyptian are used to pigeons stuffed with rice or grits, but at Zouzou, it’s served as “Kofta”, made of boneless pigeon meat mixed with onions and spices, and served as small rings, or with rice.

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Chocolate's Future Could Hinge on Success of Growing Cocoa Not Just in The Tropics, But in The Lab

FILE PHOTO: A worker cools chocolate during a manufacturing process in Belgium, May 15, 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A worker cools chocolate during a manufacturing process in Belgium, May 15, 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
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Chocolate's Future Could Hinge on Success of Growing Cocoa Not Just in The Tropics, But in The Lab

FILE PHOTO: A worker cools chocolate during a manufacturing process in Belgium, May 15, 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: A worker cools chocolate during a manufacturing process in Belgium, May 15, 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo

Climate change is stressing rainforests where the highly sensitive cocoa bean grows, but chocolate lovers need not despair, say companies that are researching other ways to grow cocoa or develop cocoa substitutes.
Scientists and entrepreneurs are working on ways to make more cocoa that stretch well beyond the tropics, from Northern California to Israel, The Associated Press said.
California Cultured, a plant cell culture company, is growing cocoa from cell cultures at a facility in West Sacramento, California, with plans to start selling its products next year. It puts cocoa bean cells in a vat with sugar water so they reproduce quickly and reach maturity in a week rather than the six to eight months a traditional harvest takes, said Alan Perlstein, the company's chief executive. The process also no longer requires as much water or arduous labor.
“We see just the demand of chocolate monstrously outstripping what is going to be available,” Perlstein said. “There's really no other way that we see that the world could significantly increase the supply of cocoa or still keep it at affordable levels without extensive either environmental degradation or some significant other cost.”
Cocoa trees grow about 20 degrees north and south of the equator in regions with warm weather and abundant rain, including West Africa and South America. Climate change is expected to dry out the land under the additional heat. So scientists, entrepreneurs and chocolate-lovers are coming up with ways to grow cocoa and make the crop more resilient and more resistant to pests — as well as craft chocolatey-tasting cocoa alternatives to meet demand.
The market for chocolate is massive with sales in the United States surpassing $25 billion in 2023, according to the National Confectioners Association. Many entrepreneurs are betting on demand growing faster than the supply of cocoa. Companies are looking at either bolstering the supply with cell-based cocoa or offering alternatives made from products ranging from oats to carob that are roasted and flavored to produce a chocolatey taste for chips or filling.
The price of cocoa soared earlier this year because of demand and troubles with the crop in West Africa due to plant disease and changes in weather. The region produces the bulk of the world’s cocoa.
“All of this contributes to a potential instability in supply, so it is attractive to these lab-grown or cocoa substitute companies to think of ways to replace that ingredient that we know of as chocolatey-flavored,” said Carla D. Martin, executive director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute and a lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
The innovation is largely driven by demand for chocolate in the US and Europe, Martin said. While three-quarters of the world's cocoa is grown in West and Central Africa, only 4% is consumed there, she said.
The push to produce cocoa indoors in the US comes after other products, such as chicken meat, have already been grown in labs. It also comes as supermarket shelves fill with evolving snack options — something that developers of cocoa alternatives say shows people are ready to try what looks and tastes like a chocolate chip cookie even if the chip contains a cocoa substitute.
They said they also are hoping to tap into rising consciousness among consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow it, particularly the use of child labor in the cocoa industry.
Planet A Foods in Planegg, Germany, contends the taste of mass market chocolate is derived largely from the fermentation and roasting in making it, not the cocoa bean itself. The company's founders tested out ingredients ranging from olives to seaweed and settled on a mix of oats and sunflower seeds as the best tasting chocolate alternative, said Jessica Karch, a company spokesperson. They called it “ChoViva” and it can be subbed into baked goods, she said.
“The idea is not to replace the high quality, 80% dark chocolate, but really to have a lot of different products in the mass market,” Karch said.
Yet while some are seeking to create alternative cocoa sources and substitutes, others are trying to bolster the supply of cocoa where it naturally grows. Mars, which makes M&Ms and Snickers, has a research facility at University of California, Davis aimed at making cocoa plants more resilient, said Joanna Hwu, the company's senior director of cocoa plant science. The facility hosts a living collection of cocoa trees so scientists can study what makes them disease-resistant to help farmers in producing countries and ensure a stable supply of beans.
“We see it as an opportunity, and our responsibility,” Hwu said.
In Israel, efforts to expand the supply of cocoa are also underway. Celleste Bio is taking cocoa bean cells and growing them indoors to produce cocoa powder and cocoa butter, said co-founder Hanne Volpin. In a few years, the company expects to be able to produce cocoa regardless of the impact of climate change and disease — an effort that has drawn interest from Mondelez, the maker of Cadbury chocolate.
“We only have a small field, but eventually, we will have a farm of bioreactors,” Volpin said.
That's similar to the effort under way at California Cultured, which plans to seek permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to call its product chocolate, because, according to Perlstein, that's what it is.
It might wind up being called brewery chocolate, or local chocolate, but chocolate no less, he said, because it's genetically identical though not harvested from a tree.
“We basically see that we're growing cocoa — just in a different way,” Perlstein said.