Alabama News Center — Abadir’s bakery in Greensboro, Alabama, fuses Egyptian, Southern flavors

By: Jennifer Kornegay / Alabama Living

A block behind the heart of Greensboro’s tiny downtown, a small cottage painted pine-tree green is flying a flag that whips in the wind before unfurling to proclaim, “Love each other.” The house was once a home, but today a small hand-lettered sign near the sidewalk says it’s Abadir’s Cottage, home base for the food business Abadir’s that Sarah Cole has been building since 2020.

In its kitchen, Cole deftly draws from her family’s Egyptian heritage, stirs in some of her upbringing in nearby Demopolis and blends it with skills gained during some time in Pennsylvania resulting in a Middle East-meets-Alabama cuisine that’s all her own. She dreams up and whips up sweet and savory pastries, cookies, breads, sandwiches, stews, salads and beautiful fresh-flower-festooned cakes for catering gigs, website orders and for sale at farmers markets and pop-up events, and soon from the Greensboro cottage space.

Cole’s recipes are often her own twists on classics, and not all of her Egyptian treats are strictly traditional. Ingredient lists include usual Southern suspects like tomatoes, okra and molasses but Middle Eastern flavors too, like honey, dates, anise, coriander and rosewater. Her Alabama upbringing and devotion to using seasonal, local ingredients, particularly produce (often from her own garden), are routinely in the mix, exemplified in her cornmeal poundcake with fine-ground coriander seeds and almonds, carrot cake with dried apricots and pickled collards stuffed with herbed rice, a nod to Egyptian stuffed grape leaves.

The Alabama Weather Blog is pleased to present an excerpt from a featured article in partnership with the Alabama News Center. For the full post including images, videos, and related links, please visit the article HERE.

Category: ALL POSTS, Partner News Stories