What is Sohan?

Sohan is a Persian toffee-brittle built from wheat sprout extract, flour, sugar, butter, saffron, cardamom, and rosewater, cooked to hard-crack and poured into shallow amber rounds studded with slivered pistachio and almond. Qom is the acknowledged capital — the city sells it the way Naples sells sfogliatella, in stacked tins outside every shop near the shrine — and Iranians will name their preferred Qom brand with the specificity of people arguing about barbecue. The wheat-sprout base, jooneh gandom, is what separates real sohan from generic nut brittle: it lends a faintly malty, almost savory undertone that keeps the sugar from going one-dimensional. The gold comes entirely from saffron, and a good piece smells of rosewater before you've even snapped it.

There are regional relatives — sohan asali, the honey-based Isfahani version, softer and chewier; sohan-e ardi; sohan gazi — but the flat Qom disc is the default, and it is eaten with tea, never alone. It is also the archetypal souvenir: nobody returns from Qom without tins distributed to relatives who complain about the price and then finish the tin. It does not survive heat and it does not survive humidity, which is why the tins are plastic-lined and why sohan bought from a Los Angeles Persian market in August is a genuine gamble.