Cracked wheat fermented with yogurt, dried in sheets under the late-summer sun, then ground to a pale, chalky powder. Sour, creamy and intensely savoury at once — the mountain pantry's answer to winter.
Also known as kichk · keshek · kishik
Every Sofra recipe is free to read here on the web. The app carries an Ingredient Atlas covering dozens of Levantine ingredients — in English, Arabic and Portuguese, with the name in French and Spanish too — alongside a free collection of 112 recipes to cook from.
Get Sofra — free download →Sour first — a deep, lactic sourness closer to an aged cheese than to fresh yogurt — with a wheaty, almost nutty body underneath it. Dry kishk smells faintly of a cheese cellar.
Cooked, it thickens and turns savoury, and the sourness settles into something nearer broth than dairy. It is not a seasoning you are tasting. It is a fermentation, and nothing on a spice shelf reproduces it.
Commonly shelved near the burghul and the dried pulses rather than with the spices.
Sold in Levantine and Middle Eastern groceries as a loose powder or in sealed bags, usually labelled kishk or kichk. Look for an even, pale beige. A grey cast or a sour-fat smell commonly means it has been kept too long.
Store it dry: an airtight jar in a cool cupboard, out of the light. Kishk was made to last a winter without refrigeration and behaves that way — but once opened, cook through it within the season rather than holding it for a second year.
Kishk is cracked wheat fermented with yogurt, dried in thin sheets in the sun and ground to a pale powder. It is one of the oldest fermented grain preparations of the Levant, made in late summer and eaten through the winter.
Deeply sour and savoury, with a lactic tang closer to aged cheese than to yogurt, over a wheaty body. Cooked, it thickens into a porridge or soup whose sourness reads more like broth than dairy.
They share a name and a principle — dairy preserved by drying — but they are not the same preparation. Levantine kishk is fermented with cracked wheat and ground to a powder. Kashk in Iran and Turkey commonly refers to a dried or reconstituted whey product made without grain.
There is no true substitute; the sourness comes from a fermentation you cannot shortcut. The nearest approach is thick labneh loosened with stock, thickened with fine bulgur and sharpened with lemon.
In an airtight jar in a cool, dark cupboard. Properly dried kishk keeps a whole winter without refrigeration. Once opened, use it through the season rather than holding it a second year.
Most often a thick winter porridge with fried onion, garlic and olive oil, or a soup with lamb and caramelised onion. Sofra documents three kishk dishes, including the Idlib and South Lebanese versions.
