Recipes

A recipe is, in the end, a nutrition table written in a different language. The exact same dish can range from 250 to 600 calories depending on the amount of oil, the serving size and whether it is fried or baked — and most recipe sites simply don’t say so. This section presents recipes from different cuisines using ingredients familiar in Israel, substitutes for less available ingredients, and a nutritional estimate per serving. The substitutes are listed in each recipe, along with the expected change in flavor or texture.

How we calculate calories per serving

• The serving is defined before calculating. A “serving” is a concrete number — a 300 ml bowl, a 150-gram skewer, a 45-gram square. Without such a definition, any calorie number is meaningless.
• Oil is the biggest variable. A tablespoon of olive oil is about 120 calories. A recipe that absorbs four tablespoons in frying is completely different from the same recipe baked in the oven, even if the ingredient list is identical.
• The numbers are an estimate, not a measurement. The fat percentage of the meat, the brand, the substitutes and the amount of sauce can change the result considerably. The estimates here are meant to give the right order of magnitude for a decision, not a laboratory value.

What’s on every recipe page

Every page is built in the same order, so you can jump straight to the relevant part:

1. What the dish is and where it comes from — the original name, its common Hebrew transliterations, and what sets it apart from a similar dish it gets confused with.
2. Times and quantity — prep time, cooking time, number of servings and difficulty, in one line at the top of the recipe.
3. Ingredients for a defined number of servings — and usually also substitutes for ingredients that are hard to find in Israel.
4. The method, highlighting the step that determines the result. Almost every recipe has one such step, and it isn’t always the step that looks most complicated.
5. A nutrition table per serving — calories and macronutrients, alongside an explanation of where the calories come from and what changes them.
6. Variations — including lighter versions, and how many calories they really save.
7. Questions and answers about the common mishaps with that dish.

The cuisines on the site

Turkish cuisine — ten classic dishes: lentil soup, lahmacun, manti, Adana kebab, imam bayildi, baklava and more, each with a full recipe and a calorie estimate.

Persian cuisine — ten Iranian dishes: ghormeh sabzi, fesenjan, chelo kabab koobideh, tahchin, ash reshteh, mirza ghasemi and more.

Iraqi cuisine — ten Iraqi dishes: masgouf, tbit, dolma, kubba hamusta, bamia, amba, kleicha and more.

Moroccan cuisine — ten Moroccan dishes: couscous with seven vegetables, chicken tagine with preserved lemon, harira, pastilla, dafina, matbucha, zaalouk, chebakia and more.

Tripolitan cuisine — ten dishes of the Jews of Libya: mafroum, chraime, red couscous, tbecha bsilk, shorba, nokidess, arisa, bazin, shakshuka and makroud.

Yemenite cuisine — ten Yemenite-Jewish dishes identified with Israeli cuisine: Yemenite soup, jachnun, kubaneh, malawach, lahoh, saluf, schug, hilbe, asida and zalabia.

Tunisian cuisine — ten Tunisian dishes: fricassee, brik, pkaila, msoki, fish couscous, ojja merguez, lablabi, slata mechouia, mloukhia and bambalouni.

Georgian cuisine — ten Georgian dishes: two kinds of khachapuri, khinkali, lobio, pkhali, badrijani, chakhokhbili, chakapuli, kharcho and churchkhela.

Bukharan cuisine — ten dishes of the Jews of Bukhara and Central Asia: oshpalov, bakhsh, osh savo, manti, dushpara, bichak, gushgiza, lagman, non and Bukharan salad.

Ethiopian cuisine — ten Ethiopian and Ethiopian-Jewish dishes: injera, doro wat, misir wat, shiro, tibs, cooked kitfo, gomen, atakilt, firfir and dabo.

Kurdish cuisine — ten dishes of the Jews of Kurdistan: kubba hamusta, kubba selek, kubba bamia, fried kubba, kubba kutleh, yaprah, two kinds of kada, shifta and macaroni hamin.

Soups

Soups — ten classic soups that don’t belong to a single cuisine: chicken soup, vegetable soup, split pea soup, pumpkin soup, mushroom soup, French onion soup, minestrone, tomato soup, miso soup and tom yum.

This section is organized by type of dish rather than by origin, and it shows clearly how meaningless the word “soup” is in calorie terms on its own: miso soup is about 80 calories a bowl, and French onion soup with its bread and cheese topping is about 480 — six times as much, in the same serving bowl. More soups also appear within the cuisines themselves: Turkish lentil soup, Moroccan harira, Iranian ash reshteh and Iraqi kubba hamusta.

The first three cuisines share borders and centuries of mutual influence, yet they are built completely differently: Turkish around bread, the grill and meze; Persian around rice and stew; and Iraqi around the sourness of tamarind and bread that served as an eating utensil. The comparison stands out clearly in pairs of parallel dishes — cacık vs. mast-o-khiar, Adana kebab vs. koobideh, sütlaç vs. sholeh zard vs. kleicha, and Iraqi tashreeb vs. Iranian abgoosht — two dishes built on the same idea of bread soaking up broth.

Moroccan cuisine stands at the other end of the same continuum, with two thousand kilometers separating it from the three. It replaces rice and bread with couscous, and fresh sourness with salt-preserving — preserved lemon and olives instead of tamarind and dried lime. And yet the same ideas recur: Moroccan dafina and Iraqi tbit are the same Sabbath dish born of the same constraint, and zaalouk, mirza ghasemi and imam bayildi are three different ways of handling the same eggplant.

Tripolitan cuisine is geographically close to Moroccan but built differently: tomato paste, paprika and caraway create the red base of chraime and shorba, and the Italian period in Libya left pasta and nokidess as an entirely local part of it. In tbecha bsilk the word “silk” refers to chard, and arisa is a wheat hamin (Sabbath stew), not a hot spread.

Three mistakes that keep coming up when reading recipes

• The recipe’s “serving” isn’t the serving you eat. A recipe that says “serves 4” divides the pot into four; in practice most people take a third of the pot. Every calorie calculation starts with the question of how many servings it really made.
• An ingredient left in the pan is counted in full. Frying oil poured away at the end, marinade that gets thrown out and cooking water that is drained don’t enter the body. Oil absorbed into the food, on the other hand, does — and that is exactly the difference between roasted eggplant and fried eggplant.
• The “garnish” sides are sometimes half the dish. Bread, yogurt, rice and sauce alongside the dish can add more calories than the dish itself. Most pages here also note what comes on the plate alongside the dish and how much it adds.

For the nutritional values of the ingredients themselves, see nutritional benefits and downsides, and for comparisons between similar ingredients — food comparisons.