Samanu

Wheat that turns sweet on its own

Samanu is a sweet, dark paste made from germinated wheat. The wheat is soaked, spread out and left to sprout — a day in water, then two or three days to send out shoots — and the sprouts, sabzeh in Persian, are then washed, crushed and pressed for their liquid. That liquid is boiled, for a very long time, until it thickens to something the colour of dark caramel.

What makes it remarkable is that nothing sweet goes into it. UNESCO's file and the Persian accounts agree on the ingredients: sprouted wheat, water, and in most kitchens flour. There is no sugar, no honey and no dates in the strict version, which the English account describes as made "entirely of germinated wheat and water, with no other ingredients", and it comes out sweeter than most things that have sugar in them.

The whole business takes the better part of a week. Soaking and sprouting run for days; the boiling itself is ten to fifteen hours, which is why it is started in the evening.

The night at the pot

Because it cannot be left, it is not cooked alone. The traditional form is a gathering of women who sit around the cauldron through the night and take turns at the paddle, singing while they wait for their turn. UNESCO's description has the men doing the parts that are not the cooking — lighting the fire, carrying what is heavy — and the women stirring, singing and dancing. There is a verse for it, in which the samanu boils and we stir it and everyone else is asleep while we play the drum.

Near the end, whole walnuts are dropped into the pot by someone making a wish. In the morning, while it is still warm, it is carried round to neighbours, relatives and friends.

In December 2025 UNESCO inscribed the culture of sumanak and sumalak cooking on its Representative List. The file was submitted by Tajikistan, and the practice it describes runs across Greater Iran and Central Asia under a row of related names — samanak and samanu in Persian, sumanak in Tajik, sumalak in Uzbek, sümölök in Kyrgyz, sümelek in Kazakh and Turkmen. The English account traces the dish to the Sasanian period and the Persian one says the same.

The disagreement about flour

The two accounts do not match, and the difference is worth knowing before you taste two of them side by side. The strict recipe is sprouted wheat and water alone. The common one adds wholemeal flour with the bran still in it — a Persian source gives one kilogram of wheat to four of flour — which thickens the paste much faster. The English article is blunt about the cost: the flour makes it "taste somewhat bitter and less sweet".

So a samanu that tastes thin and slightly bitter is not a failed one. It is the other recipe.

Among the seven

On the Nowruz table are seven things whose names begin with the Persian letter sin: sabzeh, the sprouted greens; samanu; senjed, the dried oleaster; serkeh, vinegar; seeb, apple; seer, garlic; and somagh, sumac. Six of those you grow, buy or pick. Samanu is the one that has to be cooked, and the only one on the table that takes a night and several people to produce.

Iran has places that are known for it. Daraq, in North Khorasan, holds a samanu festival where it is cooked outdoors in copper cauldrons; Borujerd in Lorestan is called the country's samanu capital and turns out something like six hundred kilograms a day through Esfand, the last month of the Persian year. In the bazaars of those weeks it is sold by weight, ladled into tubs, and it will still be on the table when the thirteen days are over.