The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 05, The Kibbutz, the Camp and the Contested Table

Shakshuka

Name: Shakshuka
Total time: 40 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Israel
Ingredients: 4 tbsp olive oil; 2 onions, sliced; 6 red or mixed peppers, 1.5cm dice; 400g tinned plum tomatoes, crushed by hand; 1 tbsp sweet paprika; ½ tsp ground cumin; ½ tsp Aleppo or Urfa pepper flakes; 6 eggs; to taste Cheese to finish, if serving dairy

Southern Tunisia and Tripolitanian Libya

Shakshuka, Israel's eggs poached in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce: a blackened individual skillet holding a thick red pepper and tomato sauce, two eggs nestled in shallow wells with soft-set yolks.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 40 minutes

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Shakshuka is a genuine southern Tunisian dish, born of winter scarcity: the word is southern Tunisian Arabic for the stirring, circular hand motion used to build the thick base sauce, traditionally made with potatoes rather than tomatoes, a fat-rich roux for winter warmth when meat was unaffordable. It reached Israel with the 1950s North African waves, and the Tunisian-Jewish writer Rafram Hadad names the Tripolitanian, Libyan, Jewish community specifically for its spread into Israel, alongside the Tunisian route, not Tunisian alone as it is usually told. Its Israeli transformation is itself documented: the traditional winter, potato-based, roux-thickened dish became a year-round, tomato-based one using tomato paste as a shortcut for the slow-built roux, which Hadad reads as a faster, more Western-inflected food culture replacing a slower North African one, and Israeli food writing largely presented shakshuka from the late 2000s onward with little of this context, why it is now widely, and wrongly, treated as simply "an Israeli dish."

by Southern Tunisia and Tripolitanian Libya

The clearest single food-world articulation of the devaluation comes from Rafram Hadad, a Djerba-born Tunisian-Jewish visual artist writing from inside the tradition: Israeli culinary culture elevated European cuisines while dismissing North African Jewish traditions, "escaping from its Jewish roots," even as it later claimed shakshuka as purely Israeli. One nuance worth keeping distinct from this: the mid-twentieth-century Sephardi and Balkan community, Ladino-speaking Jews descended from the 1492 expulsion, was, before the twentieth century, the old elite of the Yishuv. It is specifically the mass twentieth-century Mizrahi immigration from Muslim-majority states that was socially devalued on arrival, not "Sephardi" identity as a whole, and the two should not be conflated.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. 40 minutes.

Ingredients

4 tbsp olive oil
2 onions, sliced
6 red or mixed peppers, 1.5cm dice
400g tinned plum tomatoes, crushed by hand
1 tbsp sweet paprika
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp Aleppo or Urfa pepper flakes
6 eggs
to taste Cheese to finish, if serving dairy

Method

Sauté the onion in the oil over medium heat until soft and just colouring, 10 minutes.
Add the peppers, cook a further 8 minutes until softened at the edges.
Add the tomatoes, crush well, season with paprika, cumin and pepper flakes, and simmer, covered, 15 minutes, until thick.
Form six wells in the sauce, break in the eggs, cover and cook 3 to 5 minutes to the yolk you want.
If serving dairy, scatter with crumbled cheese to finish.

What a modern chef changes

A grill-charred top, and eggs poached separately for a set you cannot get from one pan

Loosely echoes Rung 2's moist-then-char logic, applied to the sauce rather than a whole vegetable

Method

Take Noam Sienna's definition seriously, that shakshuka is defined by its technique rather than a fixed ingredient list, and treat that as licence rather than a shortcut.
Build the base as above, but finish it under a very hot grill or on a Big Green Egg run for direct char rather than simmering the eggs in, so the top of the sauce catches and blisters before the eggs go in.
Poach the eggs separately, sous vide at 63°C for 45 minutes, then slide them onto the finished base at the table, a soft-set, evenly cooked yolk you cannot reliably get from six eggs cracked into one pan at once.
Serve each portion in its own small pan, in the style of Bino Gabso's Dr Shakshuka in Jaffa, one of the few named practitioners still working in the traditional register: it is a service detail, not a cooking technique, but it is the one upscale restaurants have borrowed wholesale because it works.

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