Tunisian Shakshuka (Chakchouka)

One dish, five names

Cross a few borders and this exact technique — peppers and tomatoes stewed down, eggs poached directly in the sauce — turns up under a different name every time. Turkey calls it menemen and tends to scramble the eggs through the sauce rather than leave the yolks whole. Algeria and Morocco both claim close cousins under their own regional names. Israel’s version, adopted from Tunisian Jewish cooks who emigrated in the 1950s, is now a fixture of everyday breakfast tables there. The technique is close to universal around the eastern Mediterranean; what changes from kitchen to kitchen is the ratio of pepper to tomato, how far the sauce reduces before the eggs go in, and how much heat the harissa brings.

History

Chakchouka roughly means “shaken-up mixture” in the dialects of the Maghreb. That’s the whole dish right there: peppers, tomatoes, and garlic stewed down together, with eggs cracked in near the end. Tunisia claims it loudly, Algeria has the same dish under other names, Morocco isn’t far behind, and Turkey serves a cousin called menemen. Food historians lean toward a Maghrebi origin shaped by Ottoman influence, sometime after tomatoes arrived from the Americas in the 16th century.

The dish found a second, global life through an unexpected route: Tunisian Jews carried it to Israel in the 1950s, where it became a fixture of everyday cooking, before brunch menus in London, New York, and Paris picked it up under the spelling “shakshuka.” The lazy-Sunday version people know today was born in the plainest kitchens of Tunis.

Ingredients — Serves 4

• 6 very fresh eggs
• 3 bell peppers (a mix of red and green)
• 5 ripe tomatoes (or a can of chopped tomatoes out of season)
• 1 onion plus 4 garlic cloves
• 1 tsp caraway or cumin, 1 tsp paprika, harissa to taste
• Olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh cilantro

Step-by-Step Chakchouka Recipe

1. Stew the vegetables. Cook the onion and sliced peppers in olive oil for 10 minutes, add garlic, spices, and harissa, then the tomatoes. Season with salt.
2. Let it reduce for 20 to 25 minutes over medium heat: the sauce should be thick, with no watery liquid pooling at the edges.
3. Make small wells with a spoon and crack the eggs into them, one at a time.
4. Cover for 3 to 5 minutes over low heat: whites set, yolks still runny. No longer.
5. Serve straight from the pan, cilantro on top, with bread for scooping. The pan goes right in the middle of the table — that’s the rule.

Cooking Method

Technique: vegetables stewed down, then eggs poached under a lid, directly in the sauce.

Traditional equipment: a cast-iron pan or clay dish; any good pan with a lid will do.

What to look for: the sauce needs to be thick before the eggs go in, or they’ll swim; whites opaque and yolks still trembling at serving time.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided across four servings.

At 240 kcal per serving, shakshuka is one of the lighter dishes on this atlas, built more around vegetables than protein: 12 g of it comes almost entirely from the eggs. The peppers and tomatoes also contribute a useful 5 g of fibre per serving, more than most egg dishes manage. Saturated fat, at 3 g, stays low since the dish leans on olive oil rather than butter or cream.

Economic context

Shakshuka is defensible home economics: eggs, peppers, and tomatoes form one of the least expensive complete-protein-plus-vegetable combinations available across the Maghreb, which is part of why the dish survives as everyday cooking across several countries and religions at once, from Tunis to Tel Aviv.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. This figure describes the cost of a healthy diet in Tunisia generally — it is not a costing of this specific recipe.

Who this dish suits

What About You?

Where do you think is the best place to try chakchouka — or your go-to spot to make it at home?

Also worth trying