Garlic in Middle Eastern Cuisine

Garlic is the backbone of Middle Eastern cookery and it’s the countries that cluster around the Mediterranean Sea that use it most widely. Popular dips such as toum, hummus and baba ghanoush all feature garlic front and centre. Molokhia, the traditional Arab dish known as the food of the Pharaohs, contains an entire three bulbs of garlic!

Other than punchy, garlic-rich sauces, the key to Middle Eastern cuisine lies in its subtlety: the layering and blending of herbs and spices, the sweet and savoury accents, no single ingredient dominating. Garlic plays its part here too, cooked to melt unobtrusively and mingle with its fellow ingredients, but without it a dish is incomplete.