Shatta: A Taste of the Eastern Mediterranean

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.

I followed that method up to the part where olive oil is stirred into the ferment, choosing instead to add it only when the room temperature fermentation process was complete; oil can potentially seal a ferment, creating an anaerobic environment where (rarely, but potentially) Clostridium botulinum can flourish. It causes botulism poisoning. The pathogen is repelled by low pH, and while it is possible that the hot peppers alone—and then with the addition of a little vinegar—create a naturally acidic and inhospitable environment for it (my own test strips suggested a pH of around 5), I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to the combination of oil and vegetable matter kept out at room temperature. First, the fermentation, then the oil.

The result is rich and sweetly hot. The heat of the chiles remains, but their edges have been beautifully smoothed.

I was curious about whether a slightly dry paste would in fact ferment. I expected the mixture to require more moisture for the process to be effective. But I was happily surprised. The flavor became more complex after 10 days. Yes, it was hot, but the cayenne peppers I had used were by no means the stinging creatures that they had been, raw.

I made several versions of shatta, to satisfy my curiosity: for a Scotch bonnet iteration, I did not dry out the paste before fermenting. Instead, the very liquid purée—peppers and salt, again—went into a clean jar for 15 days and only then was it dried gently in a low oven. The different chiles’ flavor profile created a very different shatta, of course, but the main difference between these two versions is that, in the latter method, the fermentation process is stopped altogether by the drying at 150°F. In the first version (dried, then fermented), it continues, albeit much more slowly, in the fridge. It’s a question of whether you want a probiotic sauce, or not. Talk to your gut microbiome.

Red Shatta

Chiles, and salt. Salt is all about flavor, yes, but it also inhibits the activity of bad microbes (fermentation is about beneficial microbes), and prevents the growth of mold. The amount of salt stipulated below is around 5% of the chiles’ weight. This is at the upper end of the salt required for lacto-fermentation to take place. You can experiment with less, but don’t go below 2.5%. You can use any hot chile to make shatta. Depending on the intensity of your particular chiles, take care when your remove the food processor’s lid, as a breath of contained heat might surprise your nose and airways. (For me, cayenne peppers were fine, but the Scotch bonnet version knocked me over.)

• 1 lb hot red chiles
• 1 Tablespoon granular sea salt
• 2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1. 5 teaspoons sherry vinegar or white wine vinegar

Preheat the oven to 150°F.

Wash and dry the chiles and cut off their stalks. (Wear gloves, and be mindful about touching your eyes and mucus membranes after handling chiles.) Pulverize the chiles with the salt in a food processor until the mixture is even and paste-like. Some larger chunks are fine.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Transfer the wet chile paste to the sheet and spread it out evenly.  Bake for 2 hours, until the red liquid from the peppers has evaporated. The paste should still be wet but any runny liquid will have disappeared. Pack into a clean jar, and cover loosely with cheesecloth or a loose lid.

After a three days give it taste and then taste daily, always using a clean, never double-dipped, spoon. I liked the flavor on Day 10.

Stir in the olive oil and the vinegar, mixing well. Add the lid tightly, and transfer to the fridge.

Serve with eggs, atop labneh or yogurt, with hummus, alongside olives, in a dish of beans, on grilled cheese sandwiches. And so on.

See also:

• Tepache: An Easy, Fizzy Probiotic Drink to Make at Home
• Bitter Melon: Like a Cucumber With Attitude
• Yuzu Syrup: It’s a Tea, a Marmalade, and a Tonic