Hiiraan Online

By EMILY MERCER

 

Hawa Hassan is a chef, founder and chief executive officer of BasBaas Foods, TV personality and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author. Throughout her multifaceted career Hassan has made it her quest to elongate the table and make the world smaller through food.

In an interview, Hassan shared her journey of how her Somali heritage, experiences as a young refugee-turned-American citizen and global communities have shaped her into a driven entrepreneur who shares powerful stories and recipes via the culinary world. 

“I came to America in 1993 via Kenya; I moved to Kenya in 1991 because there was a war taking place in my home country of Somalia. When I was 4 years old, my family and I decided to make the journey into a refugee camp in a city called Mombasa [Kenya],” Hassan says.

Shortly after, Hassan’s mother realized waiting to receive sponsorship from America “wasn’t going to happen,” so she utilized her entrepreneurial skills to sell dry goods in the camp (with Hassan tasked as her helper of small cooking tasks and taking care of younger children), before relocating Hassan and her siblings to Nairobi a year later. During this time, her father had returned to Somalia (to date, Hassan has reunited with him once). 

“It was really interesting because the war has torn my family apart in the way that conflict does,” she says.

A year later, her mother found out about an opportunity “for a little girl to move to Seattle” with the goal of her family following. That little girl was Hassan. So, in November 1993, at the age of 7, Hassan made the journey from Nairobi to Seattle, Washington, where she resided with family friends and attended school.

“When I got to Seattle, the one thing I always thought was, ‘You be the best kid you could be, the best person because when your mother arrives, you want everybody to report good.’”

During her middle school years, Hassan says she “realized no one was coming,” and decided the best she could do for herself and to ensure her safety “above all else” was to assimilate. Hassan removed her hijab and joined every free programming available to her, including the basketball team, 4-H and Young Life.

“I did all the American things. That was really the start of this moment of disconnect, even from my own family, because when I left the Somalis, I stopped talking about my own family. I had been so angry at feeling like I was left.”

It would be 15 years before she would reunite with her mother and siblings in Norway, where they had migrated through sponsorship. Still, Hassan pushed forward and decided to enter the modeling world, which she continued while attending Bellevue College.

In 2005, Hassan’s modeling jobs took her out of Seattle to New York, then to Cape Town, South Africa, before landing back in Brooklyn where she continued to create and build her communities.

“I ended up living in Brooklyn and thinking a lot about identity. For a very long time, I thought about what it meant to belong and what it meant to be me — who that came from and how I wanted to explore those stories for myself and not have that story be told to me by others,” she says.

This idea was further sparked upon traveling to see her mother and siblings in Norway, where they spent ample time back together in the kitchen. Hassan, who at a young age had viewed cooking as a chore, found what she describes as a “natural instinct,” or “otherworldly connection,” upon reuniting with her family and cooking together.

“I thought, ‘I’m just going to go there and I’m going to see what is next for someone like me. What does it look like to be with these people that I belong to for more than a week at a time?’” Hassan says, adding that during her four-month stay in Norway conversations with her mother influenced her to think about who, historically, her Somali people are and how to share their culture and community. 

“Somali people are nomadic people and they’re oral storytellers. I talked to my mom about ‘What would it look like if I could change the rhetoric on who we are?” she says. “I started strategizing about, ‘What is the space in which you can do that? What is the one thing I love doing?’ I love hosting, so I said, ‘OK, if I put food on the table, people are going to come.’”

Hassan intended to start with condiments and work her way onto the table. After moving back to the U.S., she started blending traditional Somali hot sauces with a message of bringing African flavors to global eaters — serving them at friends’ dinner parties before connecting with a Whole Foods buyer via a mutual New York friend.

“I’ll never forget naïvely in my business plan I wrote, ‘I’m going to inch my way onto the table via condiments. I’ll start with Somalia because that’s what I know. Then I’ll go on to cookbooks and then I’ll go on to African condiments from the continents,’” Hassan reminisces.

She did exactly that. 

Shortly after launching BasBaas Sauces (now BasBaas Foods) in 2015, while still hustling in New York City, Hassan’s Coconut Cilantro Chutney and Tamarind Date Sauce were written up in The New York Times and described as “To Enliven: A trip to Africa, Carried by Condiments.” 

“Before I knew it, I had a viable business plus I was becoming an industry leader in the way of thinking about storytelling, and now we’re here,” she says.

Hassan’s experiences as a chef and entrepreneur also led her to become a TV personality for Bon Appétit’s YouTube Channel and the Food Network (“Hawa at Home;” “Hawa in the Kitchen,” and “Spice of Life”).

“I think what I learned from that is if you’re the storyteller and want to be in control of the narrative, then you have to have ownership. Now what I’m really interested in is global storytelling and doing it in a way that not only gives me ownership but allows me to hold the story that I’m telling with integrity and offer those stories with decency and the breadth to be told in its entirety.”

In 2020, Hassan’s ideas culminated in the release of her debut cookbook, “In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean,” which was awarded the best international cookbook of the 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Awards at the 2022 James Beard Foundation Media Awards.

“I do everything that naïvely; I put pen to paper and then I just forge ahead and figure out the ‘nonsense’ as I’m going through it,” Hassan says of her experiences, adding the book was inspired by the lack of seeing grandmothers, nonnas and abuelas in traditional food media and television. 

“It became clear to me, in the midst of making the book — I knew that these stories were completely missing from cookbooks and traditional media in terms of food, I didn’t realize how much it was so needed. I knew I needed it, but I didn’t know that the public needed it. People in food themselves needed it. So it was a book that started a revolution, in a way, that now books are being told more regionally. They’re selling — people want to know personal stories, they want to know layered stories that are beyond just the recipe. Winning a Beard was great in a lot of ways — it made me one-of-one, but I’m really looking forward to elongating the table in a way that is tangible.”

Today, Hassan is taking it a step further and taking from her own life story to create her next cookbook. Slated to be released in the fall of 2024, it will focus on celebrating people and recipes in places of historical conflict, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and El Salvador. 

“I can tell the story of my family and I running in the middle of the night with our belongings on our backs, but so many people stayed, restarted and are living a beautiful life or living a joyful life. Obviously some with conflict, but people have found a new way of moving forward and I think those stories also deserve a place at the table,” Hassan says. “It’s about joy and family in celebration. It features 75 recipes from these countries. I traveled to many of these countries last year and it really was a joy to see these people having the same worries as us and beyond that, just their level of gratitude for living, community and connection — the way that they relate to each other and how welcomed I felt, that’s what this book will be about.”

Hassan notes she is simultaneously in the process of fundraising and finding the right partner to scale her growing BasBaas Foods business, or as she likes to say, “creating the Heinz of Africa.” 

The company has released two sauces (with four more slated to be launched), which are now produced in Chicago and sell direct-to-consumer and with select retail partners.

To accompany this growth, she is also starting a personal YouTube channel, which will feature videos of Hassan hosting guests from all walks of life and teaching them how to make global cuisines to grow the audience closer via recipes and conversations. 

“What I’m really proud of and sure of is that I have a head for business — my father is an entrepreneur, my mother is an entrepreneur. I’ve always known that my calling, once I started the condiments, was to scale this business, have it acquired and move on to my next thing. It’s been so interesting that I’ve had to build the company and myself in a parallel way because I didn’t have the money to dive deep,” she says.

Hassan, already a shining example of hard work, determination and compassionate vision within her industry, isn’t done sharing her messages of gathering communities and making the world smaller through food any time yet.

“I’m really looking forward to not only being able to set my own table but inviting the people that I feel are in need of a seat. I’m really interested in layered identities; layered storytelling; building from the ground up and community in a way that feels holistic and not transactional. I’m really looking forward to more of that in 2023.”