⚪ Jameed

Jameed is a dried, salted yogurt that in Jordan and neighbouring parts of the Levant has for centuries been made in the season when milk is plentiful. Soured milk (laban) from sheep’s or goat’s milk is strained in cloth bags, heavily salted, shaped into dense balls and dried in the sun until hard, almost like stone. This way the milk protein keeps until the next season.

Jameed is the key ingredient of mansaf, Jordan’s national dish: pieces of lamb are cooked in a sauce of jameed soaked and mashed with water and served on rice or bulgur over a thin flatbread. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed mansaf in Jordan, as a festive banquet, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Jameed belongs to a large family of dried fermented milk products, together with Iranian kashk, Central Asian kurt and Mongolian aaruul. It differs from labneh in being dried and very salty: jameed is not eaten as cheese but dissolved for sauces. Today it is also sold as a ready-made liquid paste.