Blog Details

Walk up to a Mediterranean table and the first thing you meet is not a main course. It is a spread of small dishes, meant to be shared, picked at and talked over. That is mezze, and in much of the Levant it is less a starter than the entire social structure of a meal.

Three dips turn up almost everywhere. If you understand these, the rest of the table makes sense.

Good hummus should taste of sesame as much as chickpea. If it tastes only of garlic, the kitchen is hiding something.

Hummus

Chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, garlic and salt. That is the whole list. Everything that separates a good hummus from a forgettable one happens in the technique rather than the ingredients: how long the chickpeas soak, how smoothly they are blended, how much tahini goes in, and whether the lemon is fresh.

Good hummus should taste of sesame as much as chickpea. If it tastes only of garlic, the kitchen is hiding something. It should be loose enough to pull with bread, not stiff enough to spread on toast.

Regional variations are worth trying. Blending avocado through it gives a greener, softer result. Adding chilli and spice gives you something with a slow heat that works well against grilled meat.

Baba Ghanoush

Where hummus is smooth and mild, baba ghanoush is smoky and a little rougher. Whole eggplants are charred until the skin blackens and the flesh collapses, then scooped out and mixed with tahini, garlic and lemon.

The smoke is the entire point. An eggplant dip made from boiled or roasted flesh is pleasant, but it is not baba ghanoush. You should taste fire in it.

It is also usually left with some texture rather than blended to a paste, so you get pieces of eggplant rather than a uniform cream.

Muhammara

The one people have usually not tried. Muhammara comes out of Aleppo and is built on roasted red peppers and walnuts, bound with breadcrumbs and pomegranate molasses, with a little chilli behind it.

It is sweet, sour, nutty and warm all at once, and it is the dip that most often converts someone who thought they did not like dips. The colour alone earns its place on the table.

How to eat them properly

There is no ceremony to it. Tear the pita, scoop, repeat. Do not use a knife to spread mezze onto bread like butter, and do not treat each dip as a separate course. The point is to move between them, so that a mouthful of smoky eggplant follows one of sharp lemony chickpea.

Serve them cool but not fridge-cold. Cold dulls tahini and mutes the lemon.

Building a mezze table at home

Aim for contrast rather than quantity. One creamy dip, one smoky one, one sharp or spicy one, a herb-heavy salad like tabbouleh, something pickled, and warm bread. That is enough for a table of six and it will look far more generous than a single large dish.

If you are feeding a crowd and would rather not spend the day at the stove, our buffet line runs all of these fresh daily, and our catering trays are built around exactly this kind of spread.