Egyptian cuisine is inspired by Turkish cuisine, Greek and Arabic. The typical food for this country consists of a large amount of rice, to which boiled and oiled vegetables or meat are added.
Most of the dishes are richly seasoned with garlic, caraway seeds, dill or mint, and also salt, pepper, onion and butter are some of the main Egyptian ingredients. Although Egyptian cuisine is considered quite heavy, and tourists visiting the state of the pharaohs are warned of bizarre and sometimes unbearable tastes for Europeans, however, it is undoubtedly worth getting acquainted with this original cuisine and trying at least a few dishes.
Egyptians eat breakfast during the day, lunch and dinner and they only use cutlery as a last resort, e.g.. for soups. There is always Egyptian bread on the table, which the Egyptians tear to pieces and create the so-called. “cat ears”, then filled with food.
For breakfast and lunch, Egyptians usually eat green soup made of the moloheja plant resembling our spinach and the so-called. mahszi. Mahshi is something like our lovebirds, that is, properly prepared rice with beef, onion, parsley and herbs, wrapped in grape leaves (mahszi kromb) or cabbage (mahszi kromb) and stuffed with previously hollowed zucchini (mahszi kusa), tomato (mahszi tomatom) or eggplant (mahszi bitengen), and then baked. Mashi is tasty and healthy, but it loses its flavor when it cools down, so you should eat it straight away.
In addition, in the morning, the people of Egypt also eat taameay, that is, like minced cutlets made of beans and spices, not meat, sometimes put into halves of bread and thus together form sandwiches. Taameja is also often made from ground chickpea seeds and spices, which are fried in batter and put into bread together with salad and tahina.
Sometimes we can also find ordinary fried eggs and salads on the Egyptian table, and one of the main dishes is foul, that is ground broad beans specially made in fat, usually put in a piece of shamma bread (similar to pita). Both taamee and foul are easy to buy in Egyptian restaurants, where their most varied varieties are sold. We can find these dishes served with eggs, garlic, butter, minced or smoked meat (basturmą), and to taameji we often get pale pink vegetable pickles called torshi. The prices are not high and amount to approx. 50 pt for taam and 35-60 pt for foul.
Not only for breakfast, but also in the form of e.g.. snacks during the day, Egyptians eat all kinds of spreads with bread. As for the bread, it is quite different from the one found in our country. All bread in Egypt is called aish, sometimes with a second part added to the name. The easiest way is to buy aish baladi, that is, round and flat bread the size of a plate, with a simple taste and texture resembling a sponge. Another type of bread is e.g.. aish francsawi, that is, French bread, similar to European rolls.
Sesame sauce is often used for bread, tahina, often seasoned with garlic and lime juice, and babaganuk paste. Babaganuk to odmiana tahiny, made of minced eggplant with garlic and sometimes with parsley.
Lunch is mainly meat with various additives, salads and bread. Most often we find on the tables grilled chicken (firekh) or a pigeon stuffed with rice and spices. Pigeon, bath, sometimes it is served in restaurants in the form of onion stew, tomatoes, rice or finely ground wheat.
Undoubtedly, the most popular dish in Egypt is kofta and kebab, that is, roasted or grilled meat. Kofta is primarily minced meat, and the kebab mainly lamb, served with parsley or fried tomatoes and onions, and sometimes also with bread, salad and sesame paste.
In Alexandria, the largest port of Egypt, we will find a lot of delicious fish dishes, which, although not particularly sophisticated, provide very pleasant taste sensations.
In addition to meat, Egyptians also eat soup for dinner, for example. moloheja or the so-called. ads, i.e. a thick bean soup, and aubergines and tomatoes fried with garlic, vegetables in tomato sauce, various pasta dishes (pasta beszamel – lasagne with minced meat in béchamel sauce) and also eaten for breakfast and as snacks tahina and babaganuk pastes. For vegetarians, musaga is a particularly recommended dish, that is, a mixture of eggplants, tomatoes, garlic, oil and spices, baked in the oven.
A fiteer can also be a good idea for a dinner in the city, which is a kind of soft crust pizza. In most of the restaurants called fatatri you can watch our food being made, how the dough is kneaded and rolled, and we can point to the cook, which filling ingredients to use. We have eggs to choose from, to be, tomato, meat, which, however, is distasteful and is better avoided, and various other vegetables. The filling is placed inside the cake or on top of it, it can be sweet or spicy