Shatta is a vivid, chile-hot condiment—a fermented hot sauce—rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt. It can be either red or green, and in its simplest iteration is deceptively spartan in terms of ingredients: You just need spicy peppers, salt, a little vinegar, and olive oil. And time, to ferment. While garlic and herbs can be included, and vary regionally, the most austere version, where fermented peppers become warm and mellow, seems the most eloquent. Making hot sauce in cool months is rewarding and warming, even if it is heretical (local peppers are ripe in late summer and fall, after all). But it is hard to resist the vitality of scarlet cayenne and blood-red Scotch bonnets when the outlook is bleak.
Recently, two versions of red shatta—their sincere heat gentled by the transformative fermentation process—emerged from my kitchen, and they are too good not to share. Shatta makes everything taste better.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
In Sami Tamimi’s beautiful cookbook Falastin, there is a recipe for shatta, and a conservative one: It consigns the jar immediately to the fridge, giving the beneficial microbes of lacto-fermentation little opportunity to get to work (cold slows or halts their activity). The sauce also features boldly in the life of another Palestinian—California-resident Abeer Najjar, who developed and shared her aunt’s a recipe on her blog and sells her shatta in pop-ups.
What drew me to Abeer Najjar’s method for making shatta was her compelling story, told in the blog post—a visit to her homeland, a very weary traveler, and the soothing and restorative welcome of delicious food, including shatta, made by her aunt—but also her method. While the paste of pounded chiles is often sun-dried in stages, back in the US she adapted this method deftly to a kitchen where an oven could mimic, although not replicate, the lightly drying and concentrating effect of the sun. Her technique is what I drew on to make several versions of shatta.
