Following the trail of the recipe for koshary, the famous Egyptian dish of the low-income table, reveals how inflation has fed through the Egyptian commodity market, driven by dollar shortages
Hana Afifi , Sunday 21 Aug 2016
Abo Tarek, the famous koshary outlet in the heart of Downtown Cairo that achieved a Guinness world record last year for the biggest plate of food, enough to feed 14,000 people, started as a street cart.
The recipe of koshary, one of Egypt’s traditional meals that is popular among the low and mid-income classes, introduces inflationary impacts caused by the current dollar shortage to the Egyptian commodity market.
In 1991, Abo Tarek, which resides now in a large building on Champollion Street, used to offer koshary on plates for EGP 1.5 and EGP 2 for different sizes. A few years before 2011, koshary plates were sold for EGP 3 and EGP 5.
Now prices are EGP 5, EGP 7 and EGP 10, yet Youssef told Ahram Online they have considered increasing prices further, but decided against such a move, waiting instead for prices to decrease. However, several other koshary outlets have removed the EGP 5 option for koshary.
“Even the plate of the poor, we now import it from abroad,” says Nader Noureldin, professor of water resources and land reclamation at Cairo University’s Faculty of Agriculture.
Egypt, which relies heavily on food imports, has been suffering an ailing economy and acute foreign currency crisis since the 2011 uprising that was followed by political and security unrest, hitting investment and tourism (among the country’s main sources of the greenback).
To make koshary, you can start by soaking hummus (chickpeas) in water for a few hours then boiling it in water.
Wash the lentils, boil them in water for 15-30 minutes, then add spices.
Be aware that lentils are almost entirely imported to fulfill Egyptian needs, which links them directly to the dollar shortage and price increases.
In February, a kilogramme (kg) of lentils was sold for EGP 9-11, which now increased to EGP 12-13, El-Basha Idrees, head of the agricultural products division at Cairo’s Chamber of Commerce and of Egypt’s Commodity Council’s pulses and oil crops division, told Ahram Online.
The feddan (roughly one acre) of lentils in Egypt produces 1-1.5 tons, while abroad it yields 2-2.5 tons, Noureldin said, which means locally produced lentils are more expensive, hence the imports.
