cook like a local Middle East

From spice and smoke, to citrus and herbs, dive into the distinct flavours of this wonderfully diverse region

- ORI MENASHE, GENEVIEVE GERGIS and LESLEY SUTER

Middle Eastern food is about layering flavours – spices, acids, pickles – to create something powerful out of what are often very simple raw ingredients. That sense of luxury and craveability has to be coaxed out of food by blooming spices, mixing citrus and vinegars, grilling, smoking and adding toasted seeds and fresh herbs.

If I close my eyes, I can still smell the spice markets of my youth, the intense aroma of chillies, seeds and powders from throughout the region colliding in cramped alleyways. Growing up, my dad would take me with him on trips to the market, where I’d see dozens of stalls selling spices along with pickles, olives, dried fish and preserved lemons. The smell of it all together was irresistible, like wafts of pure hunger. After the smell came the colour: vibrant hues of red, orange, black and all the shades in between. It’s the colour, my dad taught me, that hints at the quality. The more vibrant looking the spices, the fresher they taste. We’d walk out with a few bags of this and that, clothes smelling of saffron and ginger, and stop for shawarma or falafel before going home. A unified version of the Middle East is alive and well in its food, where you can taste traces of shared culinary traditions. Like the land itself, these cuisines have, over time, become divided, labelled and claimed. But at their core, these are the intertwined flavours of a communal past. Ori Menashe

Turmeric chicken with toum