Is this Tunisian chile paste the new Sriracha?
Not yet, but it sure should be.
In 2014, Food & Wine called it the “new sriracha” sauce. Time named it one of 2015’s food trends. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been using it in recipes for years. London’s Yotam Ottolenghi learned to make it for a 2013 episode of his BBC TV show “Mediterranean Feast.” U.S. chefs have been playing with it, too; Seattle’s Renee Erickson features it in a delightfully fiery dish of roasted carrots and fennel.
While it hasn’t yet become the next Sriracha, harissa — Tunisia’s legendary chile paste and one of the world’s great condiments — deserves to be in every American pantry. Robust and with a nutty, pungent earthiness behind the heat, it gives a range of dishes a vivacious and dynamic backbone with more complexity than most other hot sauces offer.
Since I fell for harissa on my first trip to Tunisia a dozen years ago, it has become one of my kitchen staples. It goes into not only such Tunisian favorites as couscous and spicy seafood pasta, but a multitude of global dishes. A spoonful whisked into Hellmann’s mayonnaise makes a speedy and rich sauce that adds the depth of garlic, caraway and coriander to the classic Spanish dish of patatas bravas. It’s great for marinating skewers of chicken, delicious stirred into a pot of stewed lentils, and a spoonful adds a jaunty punch to scrambled eggs (particularly delicious when eaten as a vegetarian taco).
But if I have some homemade harissa on hand, or an artisanal jar from Tunisia, then I simply spoon some on a dish, give it a lacing of bold olive oil and use it as a dip for bread.
The heartland of harissa is Tunisia’s Cap Bon peninsula, which locals call terre rouge, or “red land,” not only for soil that deepens in hue in the late-afternoon light, but also for the different types of peppers that ripen and turn bright red in autumn. The capsicum peppers that reached Tunisia in the 16th century after being brought back to Spain from the New World took particularly well to the peninsula’s climate and soil. Fittingly, the country’s most famous harissa brand (and best-known export) is named for the lighthouse at its tip, Le Phare du Cap Bon.
Cap Bon juts off northeast Tunisia like a thumb pointing toward Sicily. From nearby Tunis, it takes four or five hours to circumnavigate. The road around the peninsula passes through commercial towns with busy weekly souks, ruins, old Roman villas, the fishing port of Kebilia — with an ancient fortress towering above it — and salt flats before ending in Nabeul on the southeast shore. Along the way, glimpses of the brilliant Mediterranean flash behind orderly rows of gnarled olive trees, vineyards and fields of melons, tomatoes and — most famous of all — peppers.
After being harvested, chile peppers are sun-dried until the long, tapering pods, some five or six inches in length, turn a rich, ruddy crimson color and take on a smooth, leathery sheen. It
is a common sight to see a wire running over the patio of a home with drying chiles and long ristras of dried ones hanging from hooks. The chiles are similar in shape and color to larger New Mexico varieties.
While harissa is widely available in cans and tubes in stores and by weight in market stalls that sell olives, preserved lemons and capers, many Tunisians prepare their own.
It’s simple, I was told repeatedly on a visit this summer by people in markets, spice shops and around Nabeul, the peninsula’s spice (and pottery) capital.
For harissa, the dried chiles are seeded and deribbed — this tones down some of the heat — and then soaked in water to soften. Tunisians used to laboriously pound them in a mortar, but today they generally use a hand-crank meat grinder. (A food processor works fine, too.) Garlic and salt are added to the paste as it gets passed a second time through the grinder. Those are the minimum additions. Classic harissa has caraway and coriander seeds stirred into it, and sometimes cumin. After being spooned into glass jars, it gets a generous covering of olive oil.
Few savory dishes in Tunisia seem complete without a spoonful or two (or more) of the spicy paste. Cooks stir it into couscous broth, fish soups and tomato sauce for pasta, add it to salads of roasted red peppers or eggplant, and spoon it onto grilled sardines and red mullet. Fricassee sandwiches sold on the street get a generous dollop, as do bowls of lablabi, the widely popular chickpea stew served over pieces of day-old bread.
And if it isn’t an ingredient, it can always be added. Rather than salt and pepper, Tunisians place a dish of harissa on the table.
At the tip of Cap Bon, a few miles outside the quiet, isolated town of Al Haouaria and reached only on foot, is the lighthouse that lends Le Phare du Cap Bon brand of harissa its name. From there, Italy is not far off; Sicily is only some 85 miles away, while the volcanic island of Pantelleria just half that distance.
There are many similarities between the cuisine on that side of the Mediterranean and Tunisia: the abundance of tomatoes, olive oil and fish, of lovely capers and lemons.
But while dishes in Tunisia appear familiar, they have their own accent. There’s whole sea bream baked with tomatoes, but also black olives, wild capers and pungent preserved lemons; cuttlefish sauteed in olive oil and garlic, yet subtly seasoned with cumin; freshly squeezed lemonade pureed with fresh mint before being strained into glasses.
The strongest, most distinct accent, though, comes from the omnipresent condiment.
Harissa’s domination of the Tunisian palate remains unchallenged. It hasn’t conquered American tables yet, but that might be only a matter of time.