East Africa · Street food
Kolo (Roasted Spiced Barley and Chickpea Snack)
A deeply crunchy, nutty Eritrean snack of dry-roasted hulled barley, chickpeas, and peanuts tossed with fiery berbere and sunflower oil.
The story
Across Eritrea, Kolo is the quintessential communal snack served universally during the elaborate three-round Buna coffee ceremony. Urban street vendors and home cooks roast whole grains over charcoal, transforming humble pantry staples into a portable, high-energy staple. A crucial technical tradition involves soaking the hulled grains briefly in salted warm water to blister the hulls before dry-roasting them on a convex clay or steel griddle called a mogogo.
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