Mediterranean & Middle East Recipes

Is there a Tagine Pot Substitute? Let me just answer the question, because I know that’s why you’re here. No. You do not need a tagine pot to make Moroccan tagine. There. Said it. Now let me explain why, and more importantly, what you should use instead, how to adjust your technique, and what actually matters for getting that deep, slow, incredibly fragrant result that makes Moroccan tagine one of the greatest things you can cook in a home kitchen. This is part of my Moroccan recipes collection, a complete guide to authentic Moroccan cooking adapted for American home cooks. …

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The first food I ever ate in Morocco was breakfast. Not intentionally. I landed in Marrakesh late at night, got to my riad, collapsed into bed, and woke up the next morning to the smell of something frying on a griddle somewhere nearby, this warm, buttery, faintly spiced smell drifting through the open window that made my stomach do something urgent and insistent. I followed my nose down to a small cart just outside the medina walls. A woman was making msemen, that folded, layered, griddle-fried flatbread that I would later learn is Morocco’s most beloved breakfast food, and she …

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The authentic Greek salad recipe has no lettuce in it. Full stop, no exceptions, not even a little. I know this comes as a surprise to most Americans who have grown up eating what restaurants call a Greek salad, a bed of iceberg or romaine with some olives and feta and a bottled Italian-adjacent dressing thrown over it. That dish exists. It has its fans. It is not what Greeks eat when they eat Greek salad. What Greeks eat is horiatiki, the village salad, and it is built entirely on the logic that if your tomatoes are extraordinary, your cucumber …

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Spanakopita recipe made me understand what phyllo pastry is actually capable of. I had eaten it dozens of times, at Greek restaurants, at potlucks, frozen from grocery store boxes, without ever fully understanding what made good spanakopita extraordinary rather than merely fine. Then I made it properly, from scratch, with real PDO feta and fresh spinach and butter brushed generously between each layer of phyllo, and I sat with a piece still warm from the oven and understood immediately what had been missing every other time. The shattering, impossibly light layers. The dense, salty, herby spinach-feta filling that holds its …

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Greek lamb recipes represent one of the oldest and most consistently excellent relationships between a cuisine and a single animal anywhere in the world. Greece is lamb country, has been for thousands of years. The landscape demands it: the rocky, mountainous terrain that covers most of the country is perfect for sheep and goat grazing and impossible for most other livestock farming. The result is a culinary tradition built entirely around lamb slow-braised, fire-grilled, oven-roasted, minced and layered, marinated and skewered with a sophistication and depth that comes from millennia of practice. This is part of the Greek recipes collection …

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Greek dips recipes are where most people first encounter the real depth of Greek cooking and where most people also encounter the biggest gap between what they have eaten and what they are capable of making. Store-bought tzatziki exists. Most of it is fine. None of it tastes like tzatziki made at home the right way, with full-fat strained yogurt, cucumber squeezed to the point of exhaustion, fresh dill, real garlic, and excellent olive oil. The difference is significant. Not subtle. The kind of difference that makes people ask what you put in it. This guide covers the three Greek …

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Greek vs Turkish food is a comparison that neither Greeks nor Turks particularly enjoy making, and a comparison that most food writing handles badly because it either flattens both cuisines into one undifferentiated “Mediterranean” category or tries to draw sharp lines that history simply does not support. The honest answer is more complicated and more interesting than either of those approaches. These are two distinct cuisines with deep, historically rooted identities. They are also two cuisines that share an enormous common foundation, because they shared four centuries of political and cultural overlap under the Ottoman Empire, and food does not …

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Greek recipes have a problem and the problem is not the food itself, which is extraordinary. The problem is that most people think they already know Greek food and stop there. They know hummus, which is not Greek. They know pita bread with gyro meat, which is a reasonable approximation of something Greek. They know a Greek salad from a chain restaurant, which is a reasonable approximation of something Greek. And they put all of this in a category called “Greek food” and move on, without realizing that authentic Greek cooking is one of the most sophisticated, most regionally varied, …

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Lebanese vs Syrian food is one of the most genuinely interesting culinary comparisons in the Middle East and one of the least accurately discussed in English-language food writing. Most comparisons either flatten both cuisines into a single undifferentiated category called “Middle Eastern food”, which helps nobody and respects neither tradition, or overstate the differences in ways that ignore the deep, real, historically rooted connections between two neighboring cuisines that have been in conversation with each other for centuries. This guide tries to do neither. It tries to be specific, honest, and respectful about what each cuisine actually is, where they …

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Moroccan vegetarian recipes are something I genuinely did not expect before I went to Morocco. I expected tagines. I expected couscous. I expected lamb everything and kefta grilling over every street corner, and yes, all of that is absolutely there. But what surprised me, what actually stopped me in my tracks, was how extraordinary the vegetarian food was. Not as an afterthought. Not as the sad side dish while everyone else ate the good stuff. As the main event. Moroccan cuisine is, and I don’t think enough people talk about this, one of the most naturally vegetarian-friendly food cultures in …

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