Sunday, February 17, 2008

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:

monitort said...

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...

Anonymous said...

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.

Anonymous said...

it is definitely THE BEST tasting harissa available. However the hotness of the tube is kinda "medium". The bigger tin cans however are HOTTER