REVIEW ARTICLE Open Access Culinary practices: preparation techniques and consumption of Basotho cereal breads in Lesotho Pulane Nkhabutlane 1,2* , Henriëtte L. de Kock 1 and Gerrie E. du Rand 1 Abstract Lesotho is a small country (30,350 sq.km with about 2.233 million population), completely surrounded by the Republic of South Africa. The people of the Kingdom of Lesotho are referred to as Basotho. This study aimed to investigate the culinary practices with regard to traditional Basotho bread, thus serving as a basis for documenting an aspect of Basotho traditional food knowledge. The study was conducted in five districts of Lesotho using focus groups, each consisting of ten housewives in each district, and face-to-face interviews with 253 women respondents who completed a questionnaire related to their knowledge, preparation and consumption of traditional Basotho bread. Recipes for ten traditional Basotho breads were obtained during five focus group sessions. The survey revealed that most of the respondents (99%) prepare bread at a household level using wheat flour. A few (15%) use maize flour and sorghum flour is used by only (5%). The main preparation steps were identified as sorting, cleaning of grains, dry milling and/or wet milling, mixing ingredients, fermentation and cooking. Bread is used for household consumption and social functions, such as weddings and funerals. This paper documents the culinary practices for ten Basotho breads from maize, wheat and sorghum. Research geared to the improvement of the quality characteristics of maize and sorghum breads should be given the highest priority to encourage the use of local ingredients. Keywords: Culinary practices, Traditional Basotho bread Introduction Lesotho is divided into ten districts that lie within two distinct geographical areas referred to as the highlands that are predominantly rural and the lowlands where the main urban centres are located. Climatic conditions vary considerably between these two regions with summers generally hot (30 °C; 86 °F), yet many places have very cold winters. The lowlands can be as cold as – 7 °C (19.4 °F) and the highlands – 20 °C (- 4.0 °F) at times. Lesotho is very high in altitude, about 3500 m (11,500 ft) above sea level at the highest points in the mountain- ous areas and almost 1200–1400 m (4000–4600 ft) in the low-lying areas [1]. The people of the kingdom of Lesotho are referred to as Basotho, and the official lan- guages are Sesotho and English. In Lesotho, traditional bread (bohobe) is a general term that covers different types of cereal (maize, wheat, and sorghum) meal dumplings (linkhoa). The formula for Basotho bread is basically flour, a starter culture, salt and water. Basotho favour the characteristics of bread and perceive bread as the most important and tastiest food compared to all other cereal products. Bread pre- pared from wheat is preferred more than maize and sor- ghum bread by Basotho. The benefits associated with the use of maize and sorghum in Lesotho for bread mak- ing is due to the declining wheat production in recent years. It is evident that the consumption of wheat bread becomes very costly and cannot be afforded by poor families [2]. The use of sorghum and maize on their own or through compositing them with wheat as traditionally practiced by Basotho could reduce bread costs and pro- vide basic nutrients to underprivileged Basotho. Bread in Lesotho is consumed mainly for its energy supply to en- able Basotho to perform their heavy daily duties. How- ever, the main differences in the nutritional composition © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. * Correspondence: pn111@hotmail.com; p.nkhabutlane@nul.ls 1 Department of Consumer and Food Sciences, Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, South Africa 2 The National University of Lesotho, P.O. Roma, Roma 180, Lesotho Journal of Ethnic Foods Nkhabutlane et al. Journal of Ethnic Foods (2019) 6:12 https://doi.org/10.1186/s42779-019-0012-8