Couscous makes for a really versatile ingredient since those tiny starchy beads can be . You can use it for a side dish or even as the main ingredient in a one-bowl meal, and since it's a blank canvas in terms of flavor, you can season it with practically anything. But there's one thing that stumps people about what couscous actually is.
Since those little spheres are so uniformly small, it's easy to assume that they're a grain harvested from a plant like quinoa, but the truth is that couscous is a form of pasta. It's made from a dough of semolina flour and water that's then rolled, creating individual pieces with irregular shapes (look very carefully at a few grains to see what I'm talking about). And there are multiple varieties of it, too — if you zoom in on the ones with larger, more spherical beads, such as pearl couscous, it makes it much more apparent that it's not a grain at all.
Bulgur is not the same as couscous It's possible the confusion lies in couscous' resemblance to a similarly-shaped ingredient, bulgur. Bulgur comes from whole-grain wheat and is a diminutive size that you see tossed into . It's made of parboiled wheat groats that have been dried out and then ground, which creates its small size.
Because it's also wheat-based, like couscous (since it's actual wheat), you can use it in the same way. That being said, you can also use bulgur in other applications where a tiny pasta like couscous might not hold up as well, like in soup, and it has a more nutty f.
