The Best New Middle Eastern Cooking Books To Read In 2025

Enrich your weeknight meals with 100 easy-to-make, traditional and modern Middle Eastern dishes filled with bold spices and exquisite flavors. In Souk to Table, popular food blogger Amina Al-Saigh (@hungrypaprikas) is here to help you figure out dinner for your family with her easy, quick, and accessible Middle Eastern recipes, inspired by her heritage and using flavors she knows and love. She understands how busy life can get and how sometimes cooking Middle Eastern dishes can be overwhelming, but with the right know-how and the right recipes, you can serve up delicious and bold flavors and not spend all day in the kitchen!​.

This homestyle cookbook gathers the best of the region—dips, condiments, salads, sides, mains, soups, stews, desserts, and drinks—using easy-to-find, fresh ingredients and delicious Arabic spices.​​ In Souk to Table, you'll find:. 100 easy-to-make and delicious recipes from Amina’s homeland of Iraq, as well as Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, and beyond​Dinners that can be made in under an hour for easy weeknight cooking, as well as traditional dishes "worth the effort" for weekend cooking​ and hostingA simpler approach to Middle Eastern cooking without sacrificing any of the authentic flavors​A stunning photo accompanying every recipe​How to stock your Middle Eastern kitchen. Adventure across the Middle East every night of the week through accessible recipes with Souk to Table as your guide.

Explore a lifetime of recipes that capture the flavor and energy of Egypt, from celebrated chef Michael Mina. "Outstanding... [and] accessible for home cooks of all levels and familiarity with Middle Eastern cuisine" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Growing up in a Middle Eastern household gave Michael Mina an innate understanding of how to cook with spice and use acidity to amp up flavors. But when he started working in restaurants, Mina went out of his way to cook everything but the Egyptian food he had grown up with.

His family had left Cairo for the United States when he was two years old, and he felt the need to assimilate to thrive. Decades later, after making his name as a technique-driven California chef and opening dozens of acclaimed restaurants, Mina looked back to what got him excited to cook in the first place: dishes like his mom’s ta’ameya, or Egyptian falafel, and tables heavy with dips and spreads at family barbecues. Thus began years of travel back to Egypt and a new story in his cuisine. In My Egypt, Mina brings readers to contemporary Cairo and Alexandria to share the foundations of Egyptian cooking and hospitality, from the traditional breakfast of ful medames to the streetside meal of baladi bread stuffed with spiced hawawshi. He also marries Egyptian flavors with influences from around the world in dishes including: Harissa Ratatouille Halloumi and Watermelon Salad Feta-Brined Spatchcock Chicken with Mint and Green Onions Labne Frozen Yogurt. This is the story of a lauded chef at the top of his game, triumphantly returning to his roots.

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij contains more recipes and more photos. Each recipe has been restructured for more clarity, including tips and suggestions from her fans over the past 40 years. Food of Life provides 400+ authentic Iranian recipes as well as an introduction to Persian art, history, and culture. The book’s hundreds of full color photographs are intertwined with descriptions of ancient and modern Persian ceremonies, poetry, folktales, travelogue excerpts and anecdotes.

This book is a labour of love that began in exile, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as a love letter to Najmieh’s children. It is the result of 40 years of collecting, testing and adapting Persian recipes for today’s kitchen. All the ingredients for cooking Persian food are now readily available throughout the U.S. enabling anyone from a master chef to a novice to reproduce the refined tastes, textures, and beauty of Persian cuisine. Food-related pieces from the 10th century Book of Kings, and 1,001 Nights to the classics of Persian poetry, the humor of Mulla Nasruddin, as well as Persian miniatures are all included.Each recipe is presented with steps that are logical and easy to follow. Readers learn how to simply yet deliciously cook rice with its golden crust tahdig, the jewel of Persian cooking, which, when combined with a little meat, fowl, or fish, vegetables, fruits, and herbs, provides the perfect balanced diet.Najmieh Batmanglij, is an acclaimed chef, best-selling cookbook author, and cooking instructor. She is also the co-founder and executive chef of the award winning Persian restaurant Joon, in Vienna Virginia. Najmieh was hailed as “one of seven immigrant women who changed the way americans eat” by The New York Times, and The Grande Dame of Iranian Cooking by Mayukh Sen in The Washington Post. Her latest book Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes & Kitchen Secrets, was the culmination of tens of thousands of miles of travel through Iran. It was chosen as one of the best cookbooks of 2018, and called “magisterial” by The New York Times.Batmanglij views preparing a meal not only as a culinary experience, but also as a means to bring family and friends together. She encourages her readers to use her books as she was taught in Iran, to cook, to laugh, to tell jokes and stories, to recite poetry, and to enjoy the meal. Over the past 40 years, Batmanglij’s books have acted as a both a beacon and a bible to Iranian-American and mixed-ethnicity families in the English-speaking world. Her life and her work meet at the vortex of feminism, tradition, ceremony, and the nourishment of body and mind, proving that none of these concepts need be foreign to one another.