Nabeul, Tunisia—— For years, Tunisians have been harvesting bright red chili peppers and mixing them with garlic, vinegar and spices to create a delicious sauce called harissa. The condiment is a staple food and pastime for people across the country and can be found in homes, restaurants and food stalls throughout the North African coastal country.

Brick-red, spicy and rich, it can be spooned on bread drizzled with olive oil or spread on eggs, fish, stews or sandwiches. Harissa can be sprinkled on merguez sausages, spread on savory pastries called briks or on sandwiches called fricassées.

In Nabeul, the largest city in the Cap Bon region of Tunisia's harissa-producing region, local chef and harissa expert Chahida Boufayed calls it "a must-have in Tunisian cuisine."

“Harissa is a love story,” she said earlier this month at a hot sauce festival in the northeastern Tunisian city of Nabeul. "I'm not doing it for the money."

Enthusiasts from Tunisia and around the world gather at the 43-year-old mother's stall to try her recipes. Surrounded by strings of dried baklouti red peppers, she describes how she grows the vegetables and mixes them with spices to make harissa.

Zouheir Belamin, a Nabeul native and president of the association behind the event, said the region's annual festival has been held since UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, included the sauce on its list of intangible cultural heritage. The Harissa Festival has been going from strength to strength for over two years. Based on save group. He said Tunisia's growing prominence around the world was attracting new tourists, particularly to Nabeul.

In 2022, UNESCO called harissa “an integral part of the domestic supply and daily culinary and dietary traditions of Tunisian society, adding it to the list of traditions and practices marking intangible cultural heritage, including Ukrainian Roast Song soup and Cuban rum.

The condiment is already popular in North Africa and France, and is growing in popularity around the world from the United States to China.

Considered the North African cousin of Sriracha, harissa is typically made by women who harvest red peppers that are sun-dried, seeded, washed and ground. Its name comes from "haras" - the Arabic verb "to crush" - because of the next stage in the process.

Combine the finished chiles with the garlic cloves, vinegar, salt, olive oil, and spice mixture in a mortar and pestle to create a fragrant mixture. The various hot sauces on display during the festival in Nabeul from January 3 to 5 are made using cumin, coriander and different spice blends or various chili peppers, including smoked paprika. They range in color from burgundy to deep. Red sauce.

"Making harissa is an art. If you master it, you can do wonders," Boufayed said.