Sami Tamimi

Kubez bread, a.k.a. kimaaj, is an Arabic flatbread or pita bread. It’s a staple in the Middle East used as an accompaniment for various dishes or as a wrap.

Garlic and chile are what really make this das medames sing, while hearty cumin, fresh cilantro, tomato, and tahini pile on layers of flavors.

Warbat is a popular snack during the month of Ramadan. The flaky pastry is drizzled with rose water syrup and sprinkled with vivid green crushed pistachios.

In this recipe, summer produce gets stuffed with spiced ground lamb and cooked in an oniony tomato sauce. Top it off with crispy garlic, herbs, and yogurt.

This zesty dish sits between a stew and a soup and is flavored with garlic, cumin, chile flakes, and tons of fresh herbs. Serve it with rice or crusty bread for a hearty, comforting dinner.

Shakshuka is Tunisian in origin but has become hugely popular in Jerusalem and all over Israel as substantial breakfast or lunch fare. Tunisian cuisine has a passionate love affair with eggs and this particular version of shakshuka is the seasonal variant for the summer and early autumn. Potatoes are used during the winter and eggplants in spring.

Having published recipes for shakshuka once or twice before, we are well aware of the risk of repeating ourselves. Still, we are happy to add another version of this splendid dish, seeing how popular it is and how convenient it is to prepare. This time the focus is on tomato and spice. But we encourage you to play around with different ingredients and adjust the amount of heat to your taste. Serve with good white bread and nothing else.

This dish originates from Bizerte, the northernmost city in Africa. It is sweet and spicy and beautifully aromatic. It is adapted from a recipe kindly given to us by Rafram Hadad. Serve it as a main course with some plain rice or couscous and something green, like sautéed spinach or Swiss chard. Dried rose petals are available in Middle Eastern stores and also online.

Harissa, the basic flavoring agent in Tunisian cuisine, is extremely versatile. Use it as a condiment for grilled meat or fish, add it to roasted vegetables, or stir into stews and soups. We particularly like it with couscous or rice. Adjust the amount of heat by increasing or reducing the number of chiles. Just remember, it is meant to be hot!

Mograbiah, a large variety of couscous made from semolina, is common throughout the Arab world. It is also known as pearl or giant couscous and, in North Africa, as berkukis. It is more difficult to find than ordinary couscous. We buy it from Green Valley, the luscious Middle Eastern supermarket just off London's Edgware Road. If you can't get hold of it, try to find the Sardinian equivalent, fregola, which is stocked by some Italian delis. If all this leads you nowhere, use couscous only (increasing the quantity below up to 1 pound / 500 g). You will lose out a little on the interesting combination of textures but still enjoy the explosive mix of flavors.

The dried tomatoes are a great pantry ingredient. Keep them immersed in oil if you want them to last a long time. The caramelized onion is also handy to have in the fridge. It will keep there for at least five days and makes a great addition to omelets, quiches, bruschetta, pasta—anything, really.

The olive oil gives this cake extra depth and intensity. The complex flavors mature over time, so consider wrapping the cake in plastic wrap and refrigerating it, ready to ice and serve, for up to 3 days. Somewhat less festive (and less calorie laden), this is still very satisfying without the maple icing. Just dust lightly with confectioners' sugar.

This dish is inspired by a recipe from Claudia Roden's classic book, Tamarind and Saffron (Viking, 1999). It is one of our favorites: it is easy to make, yet looks stunning, and has the most delicate and fragrant combination of flavors (rose water, saffron, and cinnamon), which takes you straight to the famous Jemaa el Fna in Marrakech. Serve with rice or plain couscous.

Labneh is an Arab cheese made by draining yogurt so it loses most of its liquid. Use natural goat's milk yogurt, or, if unavailable, natural full-fat cow's milk yogurt, but not the Greek varieties.

This recipe takes at least 48 hours to make. If this is all too much, you can buy labneh from Middle Eastern grocery stores. Store the labneh in the fridge to use as a spread, like any cream cheese. A more labor-intensive option is to roll it into balls and then preserve them in a jar of oil. The jar will look beautiful, the cheese keeps for weeks at room temperature, and the balls will create a special visual effect when used, as they are, in salads and legume dishes (Couscous and Mograbiah with Oven-Dried Tomatoes ).

During the late nineteenth century, as part of their Protestant beliefs, the Templers arrived in Jerusalem from Europe and established the German colony, a picturesque little neighborhood southwest of the Old City that to this day feels unusually central European. This is the "civilized" part of town, where you go for a coffee and a slice of Sacher torte if you wish to escape the harsh Levantine reality.

Germanic influences on the city's food are evident in Christian contexts—the famous Austrian hospice at the heart of the Old City serves superb strudels and proper schnitzels—but Czech, Austrian, Hungarian, and German Jews arriving in the city from the 1930s have also managed to stamp their mark, opening cafés and bakeries serving many Austro-Hungarian classics. Duvshanyot, round iced cookies, made with honey and spices, typically for Rosh Hashanah, are possibly a result of this heritage; they are similar to Pfeffernüsse.

These are very loosely inspired by duvshanyot, or Pfeffernüsse. They are actually more closely related to an Italian spice cookie and are hugely popular on the sweet counter at Ottolenghi over Easter and Christmas. The recipe was adapted from the excellent The International Cookie Cookbook by Nancy Baggett.

Arab salad, chopped salad, Israeli salad—whatever you choose to call it, there is no escaping it. Wherever you go, a Jerusalemite is most likely to have a plate of freshly chopped vegetables—tomato, cucumber, and onion, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice—served next to whatever else they are having. It's a local affliction, quite seriously. Friends visiting us in London always complain of feeling they ate "unhealthily" because there wasn't a fresh salad served with every meal.

There are plenty of unique variations on the chopped salad but one of the most popular is fattoush, an Arab salad that uses grilled or fried leftover pita. Other possible additions include peppers, radishes, lettuce, chile, mint, parsley, cilantro, allspice, cinnamon, and sumac. Each cook, each fmily, each community has their own variation. A small bone of contention is the size of the dice. Some advocate the tiniest of pieces, only 1/8 inch / 3 mm wide, others like them coarser, up to 3/4 inch / 2 cm wide. The one thing that there is no arguing over is that the key lies in the quality of the vegetables. They must be fresh, ripe, and flavorsome, with many hours in the sun behind them.

This fabulous salad is probably Sami's mother's creation; Sami can't recall anyone else in the neighborhood making it. She called it fattoush, which is only true to the extent that it includes chopped vegetables and bread. She added a kind of homemade buttermilk and didn't fry her bread, which makes it terribly comforting.

Try to get small cucumbers for this as for any other fresh salad. They are worlds apart from the large ones we normally get in most supermarkets. You can skip the fermentation stage and use only buttermilk instead of the combination of milk and yogurt.

Figs are abundant in Jerusalem and many trees, bearing the most delectable fruit, actually belong to no one, so anybody can help themselves. Summer months are always tinted with the smell of wild herbs and ripe figs. The mother of Sami's childhood neighbor and friend, Jabbar, used her roof to dry the glut of figs (and tomatoes) in the hot summer sun, spending hours cleaning and sorting them meticulously. Poor Um Jabbar Sami and her son never wasted time and used to sneak up to her roof regularly, stealing her figs at their peak and causing havoc. This wasn't enough for Jabbar, though. The boy had such a sweet tooth that he always carried around with him an old match box full of sugar cubes, just in case. Unfortunately, this habit had clear ramifications, evident in his "charming" smile.

This unusual combination of fresh fruit and roasted vegetables is one of the most popular at Ottolenghi. It wholly depends, though, on the figs being sweet, moist, and perfectly ripe. Go for plump fruit with an irregular shape and a slighty split bottom. Pressing against the skin should result in some resistance but not much. Try to smell the sweetness. The balsamic reduction is very effective here, both for the look and for rounding up the flavors. To save you from making it, you can look for products such as balsamic cream or glaze.