Fattoush or Tabbouleh? A Short Guide to Mediterranean Salads
Two salads dominate Levantine menus, they are frequently confused, and choosing between them tells you something about what kind of meal you are in the mood for.
Tabbouleh is a herb salad
This is the part that surprises people. Tabbouleh is not a bulgur salad with parsley in it. It is a parsley salad with a little bulgur in it.
Tabbouleh is not a bulgur salad with parsley in it. It is a parsley salad with a little bulgur in it.
Done properly, the bowl is overwhelmingly green. Finely chopped flat-leaf parsley makes up the bulk, with mint, finely diced tomato, onion, and just enough fine bulgur to give it body. Lemon juice and olive oil, and nothing else.
The chopping matters more than any other step. Parsley cut too coarsely turns the salad into a mouthful of stalks; cut too aggressively in a food processor and it bruises and goes bitter. It should be sliced fine with a sharp knife.
Tabbouleh is bright, sharp and light. It cuts through grilled meat better than almost anything else on the table.
Fattoush is a bread salad
Fattoush belongs to a family of dishes found all over the Mediterranean built on the same thrifty idea: yesterday’s bread should not be thrown away. Pita is fried or toasted until crisp and broken over the salad.
Underneath sits a proper mixed salad — lettuce, cucumber, tomato, radish, spring onion, herbs. The dressing is lemon, olive oil and, in most versions, sumac, which brings a tartness quite unlike vinegar.
The pleasure of fattoush is textural. You want some pieces of bread still crunchy and others softened by the dressing, which means it has to be assembled shortly before it is eaten.
So which one?
If the rest of your plate is rich — lamb shank, kafta, anything from the grill — tabbouleh is the better foil. Its job is to cut.
If the salad is doing more of the work, or you are building a lighter meal around mezze and bread, fattoush is more satisfying because the bread gives it substance.
There is no wrong answer, and on a buffet line there is no reason to choose.
A note on sumac
If you take one ingredient away from this article, make it sumac. It is a dark red berry, dried and ground, and it tastes tart and slightly fruity rather than acidic in the way vinegar is. It is what gives fattoush its particular sourness, and it is worth keeping in a home kitchen. Scatter it over salads, grilled chicken, roasted vegetables or a bowl of hummus.
