Le Phare du Cap Bon harissa
Straight outta Compton, yo. No, wait.
Tunisia.
Straight from the pimento fields of Tunisia to your spicy and multicultural table.
Le Phare du Cap Bon: Good Cape Lighthouse. Cap Bon is also known as the Shariq Peninsula in northern Tunisia. It is apparently a very picturesque place that attracts many tourists.
Personally, I love the packaging on this harissa. The screaming bright yellow, the 50s-look illustration, the old-school sales routine. I'd love to see modern advertising gurus come up with something referencing this type of packaging for a new product. It would definitely suck me in.
Inside, the harissa is in a toothpaste-tube with the same eyeball-burning colours. If anything, the tube inside looks better than the box. AND it has one of those cool medicine-like caps with a spike that you use to pierce the foil cover.
This was $2.99 at Feast on Fruit. What a bargain. The harissa itself tastes... hot. REALLY hot. This is serious fire-eating stuff. Hotter than any other harissa I've tried, by far.
I'll probably use it to flavour couscous, or as part of a lamb marinade, or maybe I'll just prop it up on the kitchen windowsill, where it can cheer me up with its beautiful colours.
3 comments:
Hi. I was looking for reviews for this stuff and I found yours. You said that "The harissa itself tastes... hot. REALLY hot. This is serious fire-eating stuff. Hotter than any other harissa I've tried, by far." In my case it is just a little spicy. I've eaten things a lot hotter than this. Is it supposed to be extremely hot? And funny, but the package is what made me buy it. A very successful marketing idea indeed...
Hello: I am writing from France. The Cap Bon is the only readily available harissa paste here. I do agree that it is not so hot and I also agree that the packaging design is very attractive; though they kind of modernised it recently by doing away with the oval that featured the lighthouse in grey. This being said, Cap Bon Harissa shouldn't be treated as a sauce, but as a base for one in the manner you would treat tomato paste: it should be diluted.
it is definitely THE BEST tasting harissa available. However the hotness of the tube is kinda "medium". The bigger tin cans however are HOTTER
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