Food, Home & Lifestyle
Homemade Condiments: Quick Shatta Palestinian Chili Paste
Lesson time 04:46 min
Learn how to make and customize this quintessential Middle Eastern condiment to your own taste.
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Topics include: Quick Shatta: Palestinian Chili Paste
Teaches Modern Middle Eastern Cooking
James Beard Award–winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi teaches you his recipes for delicious Middle Eastern platters layered with color and flavor.
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[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:00:06.12] - Shatta is a chili dressing or chili sauce that is common throughout the Middle East, especially in Palestinian cooking, Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian. And essentially what it is, is chilies with salt that are allowed to ferment a bit and turn a bit sour and beautiful. And what is really important is, is that you get that acidity. But I'm going to cheat a little bit and add acidity through the addition of cider vinegar. So I won't let my chilies ferment naturally, which is what often happens. Sometimes people put them in the sun and leave them there for two, three days and then make the mixture with the salt. [00:00:43.66] I'm just going to add a little bit of vinegar. So it's a quick shatta. It still has acidity, it still has a lot of flavor, but it's just a bit quicker to make. And with a food processor, it's also very, very quick, because traditionally, this might have been done with a pestle and mortar or by hand. But here I'm going to take all my chilies and just throw them in a food processor. And I always have a jar of this at home in the kitchen. I bring it out like four times a day. [00:01:18.60] And it's a wonderful thing to have, because it goes into soups, it goes into stews, it goes on your scrambled eggs, it can go over anything that needs a little bit of heat. Because it's not, because of the tomatoes, I'm just adding tomatoes now, the shatta is not like an intense as chili sauce. It's not like harissa. It's not unrelentlessly chili. It's a bit milder. It's a little bit more palatable, so you can really add it in all sorts of situations. [00:01:51.81] And what I want to emphasize, is that you can always make these chili sauces your own. If you like them a little bit milder, get milder chilies. You can scrape out the seeds, which means you lose some of that heat as well. So you don't need to follow it to the tee. Just cook it to the way that you like. So tomatoes roughly chopped, chilies roughly chopped. You don't need to worry too much about that. And then a bit of salt. And it's very important for the shatta to have texture. So I'm keeping it textural. I want to have a nice bumpy, gritty texture to my shatta. So I'm adding salt. And then just shutting it and giving it a couple of pulses. [00:02:43.12] [PULSING FOOD PROCESSOR] [00:02:48.95] That's about right. Yeah, you can look, it looks quite coarse inside. You can really see this. It's going to go a little bit more process than that, a little bit more pulverized, but that's how we start. Now I add a little bit of cider vinegar. And about 4 tablespoons of olive oil. Had I added this earlier, all this liquid would have start to form up and create something which is a little bit more homogenized and aerated, so I add it now at the end and I pulse a few times just to mix it. [00:03:31.99] [PULSING FOOD PROCESSOR] [00:03:36.86] And that's the texture you're after. It's really bitty, really lovely, because you really see what's in the...
About the Instructor
One of the most influential chefs working today, Yotam Ottolenghi creates dishes that layer color and flavor for maximum impact. Now the James Beard Award winner teaches you simple steps for making and mixing Middle Eastern–inspired recipes. Learn how to make generous platters—mezze and brunch spreads to homemade condiments, stunning stand-alones, and delicious vegetables—so you can entertain with ease.
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Yotam Ottolenghi
James Beard Award–winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi teaches you his recipes for delicious Middle Eastern platters layered with color and flavor.
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