Muufo Corn Bread

Habiba Salat, a Somali Bantu farmer at Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons in Wales, provides this traditional recipe in the new “Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2.”

“Habiba Salat is a farmer at Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons in Wales. Habiba was born in Somalia, and in 1991 she fled to a Kenyan refugee camp during the Somali Civil War. She moved to Maine in 2005. She now goes to two farmers’ markets, in Yarmouth and Norway, and often cooks Somali traditional foods like muufo corn bread. Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons is the latest step in securing farmland tenure for future generations of Somali Bantu agrarians. We chose the name Little Jubba Central Maine to describe our relationship to land, the Jubba River Valley being our ancestral farmland and Central Maine being our home now. Today in Central Maine, more than 200 Somali Bantu farmers can grow their own culturally preferred foods, such as the flint corn this recipe is made from.” —Muhidin Libah

Ingredients

2 cups Maine Grains Liberation Farms cornmeal or other corn flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon yeast
2 eggs
1 cup water
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar

Instructions

Mix together the corn flour, all-purpose flour, and yeast. Add the eggs and mix for 10 minutes. Stir in the water and mix for another 10 minutes. Continue mixing as you add the salt and sugar. Place the dough in a large bowl, and leave it in a cool, dry place to rise for three hours.

When the dough has risen, form the dough into balls. Shape them into round, flat breads. Place on a hot griddle, and cook for 10 minutes, flipping the bread when it starts to color. Muufo is done when it’s cooked through and reddish brown in color.

Excerpted from Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2: 200 More Recipes Celebrating Home Cooking in the Pine Tree State by Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz (Islandport Press, 2022). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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