Light one chimney full of charcoal. When all the charcoal is lit and covered with gray ash, pour out and arrange the coals on one side of the charcoal grate. Set cooking grate in place, cover grill, and allow to preheat for 5 minutes. Alternatively, set half the burners on a gas grill to the highest heat setting, cover, and preheat for 10 minutes. Clean and oil the grilling grate.

Working with one ball of dough at a time, stretch dough with floured hands or a rolling pin into an oblong or circle roughly 10 inches long and 6 inches wide. Once you have 2 or 3 pieces stretched, lay them out directly above the hot side of the grill. Cook without moving, popping any large air bubbles with a knife or the edge of a spatula or pizza peel, until bottom side is charred in spots and light golden brown. Flip with a large spatula, pizza peel, or tongs and cook until other side is charred and browned. Remove bread from the grill, transfer to a large plate, and cover with a clean dish towel to keep warm while you cook the remaining bread.

Yogurt or milk ensures that the flatbread stays tender on the grill, while also giving it plenty of flavor and milk proteins for extra browning.
Cooking directly over a grill provides the high heat necessary to char the bread while allowing it to stay soft and moist inside.
You need more grilled bread in your life. Trust me on this one. This grilled flatbread with za’atar is a great place to start—the dough is an extremely versatile one, made with yogurt and ready to go from scratch to table all in one afternoon, but the real key here is not to skimp on the za’atar. This is not a light dusting or even a big pinch. This is bread pretty much caked in the stuff, and that’s how it should be.
For the Flatbread (see note):
10 ounces (about 2 cups) bread flour
1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
6 1/2 ounces (about 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon) yogurt or whole milk
To Serve (see note if using store-bought za’atar):
1 1/2 tablespoons dried oregano
2 tablespoons minced fresh thyme leaves
2 tablespoons minced fresh savory
1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds
1 1/2 tablespoons ground sumac (see note)
2 tablespoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt
Extra-virgin olive oil, for brushing and drizzling
3/4 cup labne (see note)

For the Flatbread: Combine flour, salt, yeast, and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk until combined. Add olive oil and the yogurt or milk and knead with dough hook at low speed until dough comes together into a smooth ball. Dough should stick slightly to bottom of bowl as it kneads (add slightly more yogurt or milk as necessary). Continue to knead for 5 minutes. Alternatively, form dough in a food processor by adding all ingredients and processing until the dough rides around the blade. Transfer the dough to a clean bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and allow to rise at room temperature until roughly doubled in volume, about 2 hours.

Turn dough out onto floured work surface. Using a bench scraper or a knife, cut the dough into 6 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, then place on a well-floured surface (leaving a few inches of space between each one) and cover with a floured cloth. Alternatively, place each ball of dough in an individual covered pint-size deli container. Allow dough to rise at room temperature until doubled in volume, about 2 hours.

“How many fish markets is it reasonable to visit on our honeymoon?” I asked my husband-to-be. “Three or four,” he answered, and I nodded. “A day,” he continued. This is why I married him. It’s also why we spent the first morning of our honeymoon, a mere 36 hours after our wedding, wandering the fish souk in Dubai.

Fish markets make an exciting travel stop for food lovers because they offer a glimpse into the local food culture and a peek at the everyday routines of the local food industry. If you have a strangely-timed layover (there’s not much else to do at six in the morning) or a weird case of jetlag (still awake at 5:15 a.m.?), the market’s early-morning hours may actually be convenient.

With the exception of Tsukiji in Tokyo, Tekka Center in Singapore, and more consumer-oriented fish markets such as Seattle’s Pike Place Market, few fish markets are huge tourist draws. In Dubai, the vendors are friendly and excited that you are interested in their fish, even if you’re more likely to snap a photo than to purchase any actual seafood.

At 5:15 a.m., when we arrived, most of the indoor stalls were set up, but an endless parade of fresh fish on ice was still being unloaded from vans, sorted, auctioned, and set up for display. Arriving this early is not a necessity (certainly, you’d get a great view of what’s going on arriving an hour later), but it’s interesting to catch the bustle and behind-the-scenes bargaining that goes on before the fish make it to the stalls.

These informal outdoor areas, like the indoor areas, were mostly pristinely clean. Men in spotless uniforms sold shimmeringly fresh fish, and the only thing conspicuously absent was the sort of smell one associates with fish. Each outdoor fish sale resulted in a mess of discarded fish parts, but uniformed cleaning people were close behind. Both indoors and out, though, the floors were wet with the quickly-melting ice on which hundreds of pounds of tuna, barracuda, and red snapper rested—wearing flip flops is highly recommended. Feet can be easily cleaned at the hotel; the canvas on your TOMS is more difficult.

When you arrive, the first order of business is to caffeinate. The best way to find a morning beverage is to ask someone who seems to be really enjoying whatever they are drinking. A man weighing out fish that bore a striking resemblance to Gill from Finding Nemo directed us to the (oh so creatively-named) Fish Market Cafeteria. The tea, the beverage of choice here, was murky and milky, warm, and oddly comforting despite the creeping heat of a soon-to-be 95 degree day.

The wild gender imbalance of the market’s workers and shoppers stood out most prominently in the dense crowd of the cafe. We were at the market for a full hour before I saw another female—a pair of ladies shopping and another tourist. While a bit jarring, the lack of women around did not seem to have any effect on how I, as a female, was looked at or treated.

If you’re like me, even all this raw fish will whet the appetite. Outside the market, on the northeast corner, is an outbuilding holding the most important part of an early morning fish market tour: breakfast. Grill & Shark Restaurant may or may not have a menu, and it may or may not grill food that may or may not include sharks. Our point-and-look hopeful methods yielded a “fish” (squid) curry and a “vegetable” (chickpea) curry, accompanied by rounds of light, flaky paratha.

In total, a visit to Dubai’s fish market will take you about an hour including breakfast. If you’re jet-lagged, you’ll probably be ready for a nap, and if you’re on a layover, this may help you sleep the rest of the way. And if you’re sticking around Dubai and have a kitchen, don’t forget to buy some of the bounty of sea creatures for a meal later—after 6:30 a.m. (once most of the wholesalers are long gone) the market is open for anyone to shop.

The market, though stuffed to the gills with blue crabs and yellow-striped fish, king prawns and sweet lobsters, is not very large. The parking lots on either side are teeming with pre-market fish sales. The west end is busier, and on the southwest corner is the Fish Market Cafeteria. The south side of the building is a fruit and vegetable market, very little of which is open this early. There are more outdoor vendors running along the northern, water-facing edge of the market, while inside row after row of fish vendor sells their wares.

The vendors kept busy straightening rows and stacks of fish, and, when they saw us passing, trying to come up with ways to get us to stop and chat. Usually this involved handing us a recently-deceased sea creature to hold.

But the most exciting interactions were when nobody was paying attention to us: negotiations between vendors, greetings to old customers, the act of weighing out fish—old school, using a basket of big metal weights to counter the fish in the opposing basket.

In the northeast corner of the souk, there’s a small section devoted to a mind-boggling array of dried fish products. There are tiny dried shrimp smaller than a fingernail all the way up to massive sheets of ochre fish the size of my entire lower body, all hung in the sun and stacked or piled high in a barrel. Whole fish, fillets, just the heads, tails, and some ground to a powder; it’s all here.

At the east end of the market, there is a fish cleaning station where rows of men stand, carefully and incredibly quickly zipping off scales and rinsing out fish innards. (This side of the market also holds butchers—goat heads or lamb brains, anyone?)

Our menu takes advantage of abundant summer produce and will introduce your pantry to a few ingredients that may not be familiar to you now, but that you’ll definitely want to keep around. For this dinner party, you can still stay close to the grill but you’ll end up with a meal that’s bursting with freshness and intriguing new flavors.

Here are our choices for a summer cookout that boasts Middle-Eastern flavor in every dish, from appetizer to dessert.

Rather than shy away from the camera or grumble about your being in the way of paying customers, the fish souk vendors here volunteer—even request—to pose for your camera with their wares, straightening the shrimp tails and thrusting dead sharks and octopi into your hands to make the best possible photograph for you.

The sun rising over the fish souk’s seaside location bathes it in a golden light as vendors start unpacking. These folks work in the shadows of the early morning, mostly selling fish to middlemen who then resell it to consumers, whether at a store or restaurant.

At this point in the summer, I’m ready to move beyond the basic hamburger (delicious, but almost too much of a grill staple) to something a little more exotic. So this week on Serious Entertaining, we’re adding a little spice to the classic summer feast and cooking our way to the Middle East.

Swap out regular lemons for preserved ones in your go-to recipes for roast chicken and fish or grilled meats. For an easy weeknight meal, toss pasta with some good olive oil, a little garlic, and chopped preserved lemon peel. Impress your friends at brunch by mixing a little of the zesty preserving liquid into Bloody Marys and swirling chopped peel into yogurt with a little honey. And impress them again at dinner by adding a twist on the peel in your Martini. Use preserved lemons to liven up potato or grain salads, or to enhance your salad dressing, hummus, or even, Admony suggests, guacamole. Solomonov even likes to freeze his, then grate the peel for granita. (He also adds a pro tip: Don’t toss the leftover preserving liquid. Instead, “sprinkle it on vegetables or fish before baking. It ups the ante and brings out all of its surrounding flavors.”) Or follow North African tradition and simply put a bowlful out on the dinner table—it might just become your newest favorite condiment.

From there, the options are manifold. In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee suggests that a solution of 5 to 10% salt is needed to achieve a good North African–style preserved lemon. (As a reference, olives call for the same percentage.) A proper Indian pickled lemon calls for double that amount, as well as turmeric, fenugreek seeds, and chili powder. Or take a tip from Sortun, who encourages you to make a batch with fragrant, sweet Meyer lemons when they’re in season. You can also add cloves, mustard seed, or mace—just a few of the spices popularized by the British in the 19th century. Meanwhile, Admony uses a 70% salt to 30% sugar mix and adds chili and paprika, for a smoky, spicy twist, and turmeric, for color. She also lets her lemons ferment for a full three months. But if you’re in a hurry, Paula Wolfert has a five-day pickled method. Admony notes that she’s “even seen some chefs make a sous vide version in 12 hours,” which, she laughs, isn’t as good as the real thing, but certainly works in a pinch.

Three months—or even one—may seem like quite the time investment, but being, well, preserved, the cured lemons will last in the back of your fridge for up to a year. And a little goes a very long way to adding that touch of umami and an alluring depth to your cooking.

You don’t need to become an expert at couscous or find room in your kitchen for a stoneware tagine to make use of preserved lemons. Pluck one from the jar, rinse it off, and add it to everything that calls for lemon—and everything that doesn’t. (As Paula Wolfert notes in her headnote on preserved lemons, “fresh lemons are never an adequate substitute” in recipes that call for the preserved variety, though preserved lemons are a fine—perhaps better!—substitute in recipes calling for fresh.)

She also lets her lemons ferment for a full three months. But if you’re in a hurry, Paula Wolfert has a five-day pickled method. Admony notes that she’s “even seen some chefs make a sous vide version in 12 hours,” which, she laughs, isn’t as good as the real thing, but certainly works in a pinch.

Depending on your neighborhood, or how far you’re willing to travel, you can likely buy a jar of preserved lemons ready to eat. It’s just as easy, however, to make them yourself. The simplest and most delicious method calls for nothing more than lemons, salt, and patience (our own take also adds a touch of sugar for sweetness). It goes like this: Start with a handful of lemons. Cut each fruit into quarters lengthwise, without slicing through the base, and transfer them to a large bowl, tossing them with salt (and sugar, if using), before covering and refrigerating them overnight. The next day, the lemons will have released quite a bit of liquid, and you can transfer the entire contents of the bowl to a canning jar, pressing the lemons down firmly until they’re completely submerged. Seal the jar tightly and store it in a cool place for a month or longer—this is one of those things that get even better with age. The result is a lemon with a velvety peel and an intense yet mellow lemony character—whose “texture is soft and flavor is deep,” says Sortun.

Over the past thousand years, these salt-cured lemons have made a meandering journey north and west, joining the cuisines of Israel, Iran, Turkey, and India. But it wasn’t until far more recently that they began to appear in English-language cookbooks. Though there are cursory mentions in 18th-century texts, like The Experienced English Housekeeper, preserved lemons were most likely introduced to American audiences in the mid-1970s, through Paula Wolfert’s James Beard Hall of Fame cookbook, Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco, and Claudia Roden’s subsequent A Book of Middle Eastern Food.

And yet, despite making their way into some American pantries 40-odd years ago, they have retained their aura of exoticism in the United States. Admony laughs as she tells the story of how, when she moved to New York in 1999 to work at Tabla, she showed her Tunisian-cum-Israeli style of preserved lemons to the restaurant’s celebrated chef, Floyd Cardoz—in her estimation, a master of spices—and his kitchen staff “had no clue; they had never seen them before.”

Once Upon a Lemon
A glass clamp jar with lemons and salt, the ingredients for making preserved lemons.
Clara Inés Schuhmacher
Originally, lemons were preserved for the same reason all things are preserved—to store and eat them past their season. Mary Ellen Snodgrass, author of the Encyclopedia of Kitchen History, traces their earliest reference to an 11th-century account of Arab Mediterranean cuisine (that is, cuisine from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco). An actual recipe surfaces in the 12th-century Egyptian treatise On Lemon, Its Drinking and Use, by the Arabic-speaking court physician Ibn Jumay. Jumay’s recipe, now some nine centuries old, is almost exactly the recipe of today. According to Toby Sonneman’s Lemon: A Global History, the recipe called for “slitting the fruit and filling the gashes with salt, then pressing them into a jar, covering with lemon juice and letting them ferment for weeks.”

While you’re most likely to find preserved lemons in traditional preparations—Algerian couscous dishes fragrant with olives and raisins, Indian curries, Tunisian chickpea stews, and, yes, the Moroccan chicken tagine—they’re a worthy addition to a wide spectrum of meals.

Boston chef Ana Sortun has a name for that: lemon umami. “Preserved lemons add a fermented quality that a regular lemon would not,” she says. Sortun, who first encountered preserved lemons when she worked for the Tunisian-born chef Moncef Meddeb some 22 years ago, was so taken with the condiment, and Eastern Mediterranean cooking in general, that she opened her own restaurant, Oleana, to honor the cuisine. Chef Michael Solomonov, best known for his landmark Philadelphia restaurant Zahav, agrees: “Sometimes it just doesn’t cut it to squeeze a lemon on top of a dish, and that’s when preserved lemons come into play. They add a big punch of flavor: heavy citrus, heavy floral notes from the oils in the peel, and ultimately heavy umami. It’s that extra something in the background of a dish that piques your curiosity.”

Israeli-born chef Einat Admony, of the Middle Eastern restaurant Balaboosta, in New York, is similarly effusive in her praise. For her, preserved lemons are, simply, “insane.” So much so that she “literally uses them in everything.”

So what is this lemon that is not quite a lemon—that is more than a lemon? Let’s take a look.

Preserved lemons add a huge punch of citrus and umami flavor that ordinary lemons can’t match. Here’s how to start incorporating them into your cooking, or make your own preserved lemons at home.
Fresh lemons are a workhorse in my kitchen, finding their way into everything from ice cream and tarts, to bitters and homemade cheese, to my go-to household cleaner. In fact, I thought I’d pretty much exhausted my uses for lemons—that is, until a fall afternoon in 2006, when I met a friend for lunch at the then-new-to-me Café Mogador in New York’s East Village. She knowingly ordered us matching chicken tagines without even glancing at the menu. The dish was unlike anything I had ever tasted: intensely lemony, with a depth I couldn’t place. It was so much more than the lemon chicken it appeared to be on the plate. I later learned that its unique flavor came from preserved lemons, which added an irresistible complexity to an otherwise straightforward chicken.

Mutura, mara, smokies, and other Kenyan street foods rely on very strict market bases: First, they rely on the evening crowd, people on their way home from work, who buy them before they get back to the house for their real food; then, they rely on the folks out drinking, saa za ulevi (when people are drinking), which is why a lot of mutura is usually sold near bars. The curfew in effect in Kenya means that mutura sellers have a window of an hour, maybe two, in which to sell off their stock. This, coupled with the fact that people are rushing to get home, means that for many mutura sellers, it isn’t worth the risk.

The first big sociological change in the consumption of mutura in Kenya was driven by the British colonial government’s employment and housing policies, which transformed mutura from being a mostly ceremonial and religious food for the Gikuyu into one of the country’s main street foods. Now, I wonder if mutura is one of the things to which COVID-19 will bring permanent change. Will more people start ordering mutura online, to be delivered into their houses? Will people start making and grilling mutura from the comfort of their homes? Will mutura places become hygienic places, with handwashing stations, and utensils being washed, and mutura served as if in a proper restaurant, even though clean mutura isn’t mutura? Me, I don’t know.

This is what I know: I miss mutura. I miss the easy banter at the mutura place, people talking about their lives, maybe football, maybe how they are going to go out that night. I miss the mutura sellers flirting with some of their customers, cutting them mutura in lieu of verbal flirting. I miss the babas who come in with their big cars and their big bellies, park by the side of the road, and order mutura for 200 bob because big man, big food. I miss the little kids who come in, feeding on a new taste, and the other customers shouting at the seller not to add chile, because these are kids, can you not see? I miss my friend, M., calling me, asking if I’m in the house, and driving over so that we can go to my mutura base, where he will say such things as, “Mutura is like sex.”

However, its illicit appeal can work against it. To some, it is non grata for a number of reasons: because of poor hygiene practices among mutura sellers; because “do you even know what’s in it?”; because of the myriad risks one takes with every bite of mutura; because of the idea that mutura is “poor-people food”; because of every manner of logical and pseudo-logical argument against its intake. Indeed, as my friend W. tells me, “I think the idea of it ruined the taste before I could even give it a chance.”

It wasn’t always so. In its autochthonic form among the Agikuyu community, mutura occupied a place of honor, as Jmburus describes on his blog, in talking about goat-eating traditions among the Agikuyu. Mutura was prepared only during special occasions, such as ruracios (dowry-payment ceremonies) and weddings. It was prepared by men, but only women were supposed to eat it; the men would eat the other parts of the slaughtered animal.

Then, the other rules of eating mutura. Fatty mutura, you can’t eat it when it’s cold. All mutura, you eat with your hands, not with a fork. Custom allows the use of a toothpick sometimes, but only reluctantly. The little ones at the mutura place, you feed them first. You always call for another round (“niongeze nyingine”) regardless of any prior predilections. And, finally, the best mutura is the one eaten in the cold, after a long hike on the foothills of one of the many mountains that skirt the Rift Valley, in a little hut where the kikuyu flies over your head, with a steaming cup of soup to which the chile you’ll add gives it that perfect monster kick.

Here’s a story: Last year, walking in town with N., we bumped into Eddie B. Listen, I told N., this guy, Eddie B., he’s the one who introduced me to mutura. This happened in Kisumu, in ‘07. That year there was post-election violence in Kisumu, sawa, people’s houses being burnt, businesses being looted, protestors being shot in the streets, but there was also mutura, and the illicit joys and pleasures it carried.

Of course, these illicit joys and pleasures are a risk. Apart from the choirs of bacteria allegedly present in mutura, the mutura vendors rarely have cashiers to handle money, and so the hands that serve you mutura are the same ones that handle currency all evening long. This leads to consumers opting for products that, while similar to mutura, don’t carry the same risks. Data scientist Chris Orwa argues that, “The product came into existence to serve a need—the need to provide a protein source for low-income earners—and it quickly became popular with dwellers of informal settlement due to the low price point (Kshs. 10) and the need to bridge a dietary deficiency. For a long time, this market segment existed without any competition and, in fact, became a de-facto standard for low-priced meat products. Then came in the big brand name, “Farmer’s Choice,” with its “smokie” sausages that are not only tastier but also rival the price point of mutura (at Kshs. 15). Not only that, the new “smokie” vendors have more hygienic equipment and with that hygiene and the brand reputation of Farmer’s Choice comes a sense of trust that is lacking in the case of mutura.”

Some kachumbari sprinkled on top, for the culture. The tomatoes in the kachumbari are loud, as are the onions, and the coriander, and more chiles, but not overloud, and they and the mutura, instead of rushing into and attacking each other, overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges. I eat, we eat, all of us, our big happy mutura family.

Yesterday, I got out of the house, in search of mutura. All my places were closed. It was six, and people were rushing home to beat the curfew, which starts at seven, everyone with a face mask over their mouth. I walked. No mutura. Walked some more. Still no mutura. I walked some more. Near my neighborhood, there is a sea of open-air garages. There, in the middle of the garages, surrounded by cars on all sides, were two mutura sellers. Around both of them, a clergy of mutura seekers, each with their face masks slipped down to their chins, munching on mutura. I walked over.