🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Jordanians

Jordanians are the people of Jordan, a Middle Eastern country with old herding traditions. In Jordan the dairy tradition is closely tied to a herding, largely Bedouin way of life. Milk comes mainly from sheep and goats; common products are the sour milk laban, labneh and white cheeses.

The key product is jameed: strained salted yogurt rolled into balls and dried hard. It is made in the season of plentiful milk to preserve it for the whole year. For small farms, researchers report, jameed provides up to a fifth of the income from milk processing. Before cooking, jameed is ground with water.

It is used to make the sauce for mansaf, the national dish, in which lamb or goat meat is cooked in a fermented milk sauce and served on thin bread with rice, almonds and nuts. Mansaf is prepared for weddings, holidays and large family gatherings, and cooking it is often a shared effort. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed mansaf in Jordan on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.