Chasing Smoke makes you long for an open flame.

In Chasing Smoke, Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich recreate the flavours of the Middle Eastern grill

Sarit Packer sees beauty in cooking over fire. From the moment it ignites, the London-based chef gets drawn in by the billowing smoke, then smouldering embers and finally, as it mellows, white-hot coals.

“Just watching it is beautiful, and then cooking on it is kind of calming,” she says. “You can’t rush it. It’s not a frying pan, (where you) fry an egg in like two seconds. You have to watch. You have to let it caramelize. You have to let the flavours intensify. The smell starts to happen and the noise. It’s a whole experience and it’s gorgeous.”

At Honey & Smoke in London, England — one of the three restaurants she founded with her husband, fellow chef and co-author Itamar Srulovich — they have plenty of chefs who tend the grill, sweating in the heat. But Packer can’t stay away, though she wasn’t always drawn to the flame.

Growing up in northern Israel, her father did the grilling — she was tasked with delivering the ingredients (and the occasional beer). When she became a chef 24 years ago, live-fire cooking in restaurants was exceedingly rare. “On the contrary, the more sophisticated the equipment was, the more exciting that would be. So you get detached from it,” says Packer. “You use induction hobs. You use all these crazy gadgets, and you never actually need to light a fire.”

Inspired by the flavours of grill houses in Israel, Srulovich tried to convince Packer they should open a reimagined version over the course of a decade. He eventually succeeded and they opened Honey & Smoke in 2016. Uninitiated, Packer initially doubted herself — but that changed the moment they installed the grill.

“I became a pyromaniac, is what my husband says now,” says Packer. “When we did it, I was like, ‘OK, I’m just going to let it be his toy.”

“And then she snatched my toy from me,” Srulovich interjects.

Packer admits: “I did snatch your toy. I’m very snatchy.”

While Packer was hooked by the process and the grill’s transformative power over vegetables especially, Srulovich came to cooking over fire as a diner and spectator. He remembers the Arab and Druze grill houses he ate at as a child in Jerusalem fondly; they were sometimes fancy, sometimes utilitarian, but always memorable.

“You get your skewer, you get your salad, you get your bread, and it was such a complete meal and a fantastic experience for me that I thought we have to recreate it. I just wanted to go back to those places,” he says.

This same impulse went into writing their fourth cookbook, Chasing Smoke (Pavilion Books, 2021). Through their previous books — Honey & Co.: Food From the Middle East (Little, Brown and Company, 2014), Golden (Little, Brown and Company, 2016) and Honey & Co.: At Home (Pavilion, 2019) — they offer a window into their restaurant and home kitchen. Now, with Chasing Smoke, they take readers on a journey to Egypt, Greece, Israel, Jordan and Turkey with recipes and stories of live-fire cooking and culture.

“It is us on holiday,” says Packer. “Bumbling around looking for food markets, asking people to let us into their kitchen to cook.”

Chasing Smoke was originally meant to be a restaurant book, Srulovich says. A showcase for the Middle Eastern grills they serve at Honey & Smoke, such as charred eggplant, lamb kofta and slow-cooked octopus. But restaurant cookbooks can be intimidating, Packer adds, and their main goal was for home cooks to experience how inviting and approachable live-fire cooking is throughout the Levant.

The book ended up being a larger and more complex project than Packer and Srulovich had imagined at the outset. They started travelling in late 2018, and were away for much of the winter and spring of 2019. If the pandemic hadn’t put a stop to their research trips, they say, their travels would have continued.

Instead, during lockdown, they channelled their Levantine journeys into special episodes of their podcast, Honey & Co.: The Food Talks — in which they talked to some of the people they met along the way, as well as their photographer, Patricia Niven — and did takeaway supper clubs. Revisiting their travels back at home, they combed through their notes and immersed themselves in writing the snapshots of the people and places that are interspersed throughout the book.

“It’s not even an iota of the material that we’ve collected. There are so many amazing photographs, there are so many stories … In a way, it was good that things changed, because we could go on forever. Because in every place, there’s new experiences and new people to meet, different foods to try,” says Packer. “We knew we couldn’t do full justice to any one of these countries or any one of the cities that we went to, so we just wanted to touch on things that excited us.”

With so many extraordinary experiences to choose from, some stood out as being especially impressive feats of cooking over fire. They were blown away by the wooden handcarts in Alexandria, Egypt, for example, in which vendors roast chestnuts, peanuts, potatoes, sweet corn and sweet potatoes. “I still can’t quite understand how they don’t combust,” says Srulovich.

While in Gaziantep, Turkey, Packer recalls a very special loquat and lamb kofta, and in the desert valley of Wadi Rum, Jordan, zarb (hot smoked chicken with root vegetables), which they detail in one of the book’s essays. (The recipes for both dishes are also in the book.)

For those without access to a barbecue or fire pit, at the end of each recipe, Packer and Srulovich include a note explaining how to prepare it without. “We live in an apartment and we had to force my parents to be OK with us digging a hole in their garden when we were (in Israel) to bury stuff because sadly, we don’t have a barbecue. We had to open a restaurant for it,” says Packer.

Srulovich adds: “We are very adept at converting these recipes to a home environment.”

But for a few recipes, such as the zarb, there’s simply no substitute. Packer and Srulovich’s Bedouin hosts lit a fire in a deep, desert pit, suspended racks heaped with chicken and vegetables above the coals, covered it with a lid and then sealed the pit with a pile of sand. Six or seven hours later, they devoured it under the night sky. Cooking it in an oven just wouldn’t be the same.

About a third of the recipes in Chasing Smoke are vegetarian, Packer says, “and this is just to show that there is a whole other scope of food.” While meat shines on the grill, cooking vegetables over fire brings out their best. “In our travels we’ve seen pretty much everything that grows, goes on the grill,” adds Srulovich. “Lettuces, endives, pumpkins, apples, pears, desert truffles, aubergines for sure, courgettes. Everything goes on the grill and it’s so much better for it. And it’s really something that you can’t recreate in any other way.”

Recipes and images excerpted from Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich. Copyright © Pavilion Books Company Ltd 2021. Text copyright © Saritamar Media Ltd 2021. Photography © Patricia Niven 2021. Reproduced by arrangement with the publishers.