Like normal couscous, the giant variety is basically pasta, i.e. flour and water dough originally rolled between finger and thumb to make what look like grains - a bit like rubbing fat into flour to make a breadcrumb cosistency. I saw a programme on French TV showing ladies in a kitchen in Marrakesh making it by hand and it looked very labour-intensive. I'm sure there are now mechanical processes for this and I suspect the ladies may have been demonstrating this for tourists, though I have no evidence for this. I've been a bit disappointed with the giant stuff - it seems to go stale very quickly, and certainly before ita use-by date, and really only palatable, as others of you have said, if well seasoned to disguise the uninspiring flavour. Yotam Ottolenghi uses it a lot - maybe that's why so many of his recipes have an pff-puttingly long list of ingredients, most of which are spices. I love spicy food, but I haven't got room in the cupboard to store so many individual ones at once, and so many which are hard to find in a small rural town in the Scottish Borders.