Middle Eats

July 16, 2023 5:28 PM

Middle Eats teaches you about various Middle Eastern cuisines with educational explorations of Egyptian breakfast dishes, Syrian comfort food, Libyan mbakbaka, Palestinian chicken and rice, and more. Want more?

Ottolenghi Test Kitchen shares recipes and behind-the-scenes of their restaurant.

Hungry Man Kitchen cooks Turkish food.

Cafe Bagheri shares food inspired by Persian, Mediterranean, and Asian influences.

If you prefer text, Serious Eats has a bunch of primers on Middle Eastern cuisines.

posted by toastyk (18 comments total)

Middle eastern food is having its moment as the trendy global cuisine du jour just as we are.passing peak Korean as the hot thing.
posted by Keith Talent at 6:08 PM on July 16, 2023

Also if anyone has any favorite YouTube channels or blogs to share please do!
posted by toastyk at 6:18 PM on July 16, 2023

God yes this channel and Chinese Cooking Demystified are some of my favorite things on YouTube
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:18 PM on July 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've been in love with Middle Eastern food for decades at this point. I don't see any reason to dismiss it as trendy. What I'd really like to find is a recipe for a ground meat (lamb or beef) dish called mahamsa that is served over hummus. It's on the menu here. That's a long established Lebanese restaurant in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I've asked them about the recipe and they've been cagey about it.
posted by mollweide at 8:01 PM on July 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Middle eastern food is having its moment as the trendy global cuisine du jour just as we are.passing peak Korean as the hot thing.

Why not both? I'll take on both, no need to compete.
posted by zardoz at 8:06 PM on July 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've been perfecting my Çılbır - https://www.themediterraneandish.com/cilbir-turkish-poached-eggs/
posted by djseafood at 8:08 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Middle eats is a staple in our household, love the onion marinade. Always a joy to watch Obi eat
posted by Brainstorming Time! at 8:11 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mollweide I checked my Lebanese cookbook and I did not find that dish but I found hummus with lamb and pine nuts. The ground lamb is seasoned with salt and pepper and seven spice seasoning which you can get in any middle eastern market. It’s browned in a pan with olive oil for about five to six minutes. You can experiment with the spices and maybe add cayenne and/or paprika to see if you can get something close to what it tastes like? Hopefully that would work for you.
posted by toastyk at 9:06 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love Middle Eats, cool to see it on the blue! Obi just has the most pleasant on screen persona, a joy to watch.

Also if anyone has any favorite YouTube channels or blogs to share please do!

A few in regular rotation lately: Refika's Kitchen, ArnieTex (because, I mean, how do you not love this?), My Name is Andong, Italia Squisita, Aaron and Claire, Charlie Anderson, French Cooking Academy, Souped Up Recipes, Tasting History With Max Miller, NAEY Cooking (still a new small channel and very focused on the host learning as an amateur but I like what I've seen!) and of course, always always always, Chef John from Foooood Wishes dot com wiiiiith...
posted by jason_steakums at 9:15 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Makluba (the linked video under Palestinian Chicken and Rice) is one of those dishes that requires effort, but not as much as you'd think if you have it for the first time. And it's one of the biggest crowd-pleasers you can cook for a group, especially if you dramatically serve it. It's also very adaptable to almost any combo of meat and veg.
posted by chaz at 9:33 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

toastyk, thanks for that! What you described is pretty much what I've settled on after years of experimentation, and it's close but not quite it. I haven't tried paprika, though. Time to defrost the ground lamb I have in the fridge!
posted by mollweide at 6:30 AM on July 17, 2023

Lebanese food (in New Brunswick NJ as it happens) was my gateway out of bland whitebread american food into a world of deliciousness.
posted by supermedusa at 7:41 AM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Love this channel - I've done the quick chicken shawarma recipe multiple times, and the stuffed vine leaves a couple of times, and both turned out very good.
posted by motdiem2 at 7:43 AM on July 17, 2023

YES I absolutely love Middle Eats so much. I actually found out about it on Chinese Food Demystified! Glad to see it mentioned on MetaFilter.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 8:19 AM on July 17, 2023

Yay Obi YAY Salma yay onion marinade and fluffly garlic fluff and koshari and cool drinks and, and, and!.
Refika's Kitchen is very good too, she is mentioned as inspiration on Middle Eats and I like how she points out why things work/won't work.
posted by winesong at 8:37 AM on July 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Made with Lau is a gem.
posted by oflinkey at 8:56 AM on July 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Middle eastern food is having its moment as the trendy global cuisine du jour just as we are.passing peak Korean as the hot thing.

A friend of mine was a Marine reservist who did two tours in Iraq. He had this theory that if you want to predict the next big American food craze, look at where America has invaded, and give it about 5 years for veterans to return with a revived hunger for the cuisine of their occupied subjects and maybe another 10 years for it to hit the mainstream spotlight depending on the amount of migration or refugee flight into the US.

After WWII, French and Italian cuisine got a huge boost in the 1950s, and Japanese food took a few decades longer largely because Japanese wouldn't come to the US in large numbers until the 70s and 80s. Thai food, pho, and sriracha became a thing a few decades after the Vietnam War. So, he was betting on mujadara, falafel and kebabs getting big in the run up to 2030 and it's just a little ahead of schedule now.

Which, of course, means that the next big food trend to invest in during the 2040s are Ukrainian potato dumpling food trucks.
posted by bl1nk at 10:42 AM on July 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

When I first moved away from SE Michigan about 15 years ago, I was shocked to discover how much harder it was to get good middle eastern food. And I couldn't find a lot of recipes. I think it took a year or so for me to even find one single recipe for ghallaba. Now it looks like I have a few different options to choose from. Yay!
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:28 PM on July 17, 2023 [3 favorites]