The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 05, The Kibbutz, the Camp and the Contested Table
Sabich
Ramat Gan, 1961
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Sabich began as a traditional Iraqi Jewish breakfast, its parts, fried aubergine, hard-boiled haminados eggs, salad, amba, tahini, historically eaten separately off a plate. The person credited with combining them into a pita sandwich is Sabich Tzvi Halabi, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant born in Baghdad in 1938, who with his wife Rina opened a drinks-and-snacks kiosk on Uziel Street in Ramat Gan in 1961; bus drivers on the number 63 line, whose route ended there, asked for something more filling, and Halabi assembled the sandwich from the components he already had behind the counter. The stand moved to HaRoeh Street in 1982 and still operates; Halabi died in 2012, and Yaakov Sasson, his business partner from the 1960s, ran it alongside the Halabi family until his own death in 2018. This chapter corrects, rather than repeats, a name that circulates for the dish's invention, "Tzion Sasson": no source names anyone by that name as the originator. So many Iraqi Jewish immigrants settled around Ramat Gan that the area became known as "Little Baghdad," the direct social context for why an Iraqi breakfast dish was reinvented as street food there specifically.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 2 large aubergines, sliced into 1cm rounds
- 1 tsp salt, for degorging
- 500ml frying oil
- 4 eggs, boiled 10 minutes, peeled
- 4 pitta breads
- 120g tahini
- 90ml water
- 15ml lemon juice
- 1 garlic clove, crushed
- 300g tomato, diced
- 250g cucumber, diced
- 80g red onion, thinly sliced
- to taste amba, to taste
- a small handful, chopped flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Method
- Salt the aubergine rounds and stand 30 minutes to draw out bitterness, then pat dry.
- Shallow-fry in the oil in batches, 3 to 4 minutes a side, until deep golden and collapsed; drain.
- Whisk the tahini with the water, lemon juice and garlic to a smooth, pourable sauce.
- Warm the pitta, split, and layer aubergine, halved boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, onion, a generous spoon of amba, a scatter of parsley and the tahini sauce.
What a modern chef changes
Aubergine cooked in two stages, sous vide then flash-fried, plus amba made from scratch
Rung 2, the moist-then-char mechanism transferred from a whole vegetable to sliced aubergine
Method
- Aubergine is the whole dish's weak point when done badly, soggy where it should be collapsed and creamy, so cook it in two stages: sous vide the whole rounds at 85°C for 40 minutes to render the flesh fully soft and custardy without oil, then dry them thoroughly and flash-fry, 60 to 90 seconds a side, in oil at 190°C, just to build a crisp exterior over an interior that is already fully cooked, rather than trying to get both jobs done in one long, oil-heavy fry.
- Dehydrate a batch of thin aubergine skin, seasoned with a little cumin and salt, until brittle, and crumble it over the top for a genuine textural echo of the vegetable rather than a garnish for its own sake.
- Make the amba from scratch: unripe mango, fenugreek, mustard seed, turmeric and chilli, fermented in brine 5 to 7 days, which gives a sourness and depth no jar sold in Britain currently matches.