Ramadan Project: Syrian Fattet Makdous vs. Palestinian Fattet Makdous

It’s the second dish of me and Dima’s Ramadan project! Baby eggplants which are stuffed and fried are smothered in a sauce of garlicky yogurt and tomatoes- fattet makdous is what dreams are made of. If you missed week one, you can catch it here.

There’s no Ramadan table complete without fatteh. Fatteh means crushed or crumbed, and in this case, it’s referring to crushed fried pita bread. There are all sorts of variations on fatteh, and the most common during Ramadan is hummus fatteh. For our Ramadan project, we chose the baby eggplant version because a) it’s delicious and b) we wanted to highlight one significant difference between our eating cultures: the use of tahini.

Dima’s fattet makdous uses a sauce of mostly tahini with a little bit of yogurt. She explained to me that in her region in Palestine, the use of tahini is very important, and they use loads of it. We, on the other hand, only use a couple spoonfuls of tahini, and we use lots of labneh (strained yogurt) for our sauce. Dima also mixes parsley into her sauce, while I just topped my dish with parsley.

The other components were essentially the same: meat, onion and pine nut stuffed baby eggplants which are deep fried, tangy tomato sauce and extra topped pine nuts and parsley. Dima usually uses fried pita croutons, but she forgot them on this day, so she used toast. She usually uses the pita chips, so I’m not considering this a difference with the recipe 😋.

Both dishes were absolutely delicious in their own unique way. I encourage you to give both a try! You can catch my recipe here and Dima’s post here. Do you have experiences with fattet makdous? We’d love to hear! Tag #RamadanSpecial2019 to participate, and we’ll share our favorites! Happy eating!