Crispy Pita, Spiced Chickpeas and Yoghurt Sauce for Middle Eastern Fatteh

This recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce makes fatteh, a shared Middle Eastern breakfast dish comprised mainly of leftovers. Stale pita bread is toasted to create crispy pita chips. Warm cumin-spiced chickpeas are spooned over the pita crisps, a lemony-garlic yogurt sauce drizzled over the chickpeas, and pan-roasted nuts are sprinkled on top.

This Middle Eastern fatteh recipe will make you a rustic home-style breakfast dish of crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce, sprinkled with fresh fragrant herbs such as parsley and mint, and pan-roasted nuts such as cashews, pistachios and pine nuts. It’s one of our best recipes with nuts, one of our best chickpea recipes, one of my favourite Middle Eastern recipes.

I’ve long called fatteh the Middle Eastern nachos, although a Middle Eastern chilaquiles is probably more accurate, as fatteh is a breakfast dish said to have been created to use up leftovers – stale pita bread, leftover chickpeas, and yogurt that might have been leftover from other dishes.

This recipe is based on a Syrian fatteh we used to eat years ago when we lived in the Middle East. I’ll also be sharing another Syrian breakfast dish of ful from Aleppo. Although it must be said that there are different types of fatteh right across the Middle East that differ from country to country, town to town, village to village, and home to home.

This fatteh recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce is the first in a series of new Middle Eastern recipes that we’ll add to our archive of Arabic recipes from a region where we lived, worked and travelled for a decade. I often share these during Ramadan, although you can cook and eat these dishes all year. It’s just during Ramadan that I get nostalgic for a region we love and miss.

Now before I tell you more about our Middle Eastern fatteh recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader supported. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by buying a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever; or buying something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers or classic cookbooks for serious cooks. We may earn a small commission but you won’t pay extra.

Now let me tell you all about this Middle Eastern fatteh recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce.

Crispy Pita with Spiced Chickpeas and Yogurt Sauce for Middle Eastern Fatteh

Before I share our Middle Eastern fatteh recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce, let me tell you why I’m sharing this popular breakfast recipe. Yes, we are still living in Siem Reap, but I’ve been getting terribly sentimental recently and recollecting our years in the Middle East and the places we travelled and people we met, and the food we cooked and ate.

We moved to the Middle East many years ago so I could take up a job teaching filmmaking, writing and media studies to young Emirati women at a college in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Back then, Abu Dhabi wasn’t the sophisticated, modern capital it is now – in fact, it was still considered something of a hardship posting by many of the oil workers, engineers, nurses, and teachers who still comprised the bulk of expats. Food wise, it was easier to find Lebanese and Syrian food than Emirati food, so that’s mainly what we ate.

We’d only been living in the UAE for a few months when a dear friend from Sydney came to visit and we all hopped on a plane to Beirut for New Year’s Eve. It was wild. And to be able to finally taste the Lebanese food we’d fallen in love with in the UAE in Lebanon was incredible. We fell head over heels with the cuisine, people, culture, and country.

Sadly, Terence and I had to return to Abu Dhabi for work, while Dianne continued onto Syria. It would be another few months before we got to Damascus. When we did, Terence and I became completely smitten with the Syrian capital – the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city! – and the Syrian people, rich culture and cuisine, and eating out in Damascus in some of the most atmospheric restaurants in the Middle East.

After holidays in both Syria and Lebanon from our base in Abu Dhabi, and repeat trips every chance we got, Terence and I would go on to write a first edition of Lonely Planet’s Syria and Lebanon travel guidebook. We’d also return to Syria to do an update, as well as do multiple magazine stories, not long before the Syrian civil war.

So from time to time we cook Syrian food – as well as Lebanese food, and other Middle Eastern cuisines, because they’re all what we call ‘same same but different’ here in Southeast Asia. And that process of cooking, as much as eating, transports us back to a time and place that we were so fond of.

My fatteh recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce will make you a Syrian version of this popular Middle Eastern breakfast dish, although it has to be said that there are many variations of fatteh in Syria, sprinkled with everything from ground lamb to pomegranate seeds.

Some versions of Syrian fatteh are very wet, more like a hearty chickpea soup or light chickpea stew. When I was trying to recreate the fatteh of my memories, my research revealed that Syrian fatteh recipes tend to include tahini, whereas most other Middle Eastern fatteh recipes don’t.

I also noticed that many other Middle Eastern fatteh recipes online, published by food bloggers in English, are distinguished by a thick layer of what looks to me to be more like labneh rather than ‘yogurt sauce’. Was something lost in translation?

Or has fatteh changed so much in the many years since we lived in the Middle East and travelled the region? Are young food bloggers more generous when it comes to spreading a layer of labneh on their fatteh than the older generation of cook who might have been more frugal with their yogurt sauce?

I’m going to be investigating all of those things – and if you have some thoughts on the subject I’d love to hear from you – but until then, here’s my fatteh recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce for a Syrian version of this popular Middle Eastern breakfast dish we first ate (gulp) way back in the late 1990s.

Tips to Make this Crispy Pita with Spiced Chickpeas and Yogurt Sauce for Middle Eastern Fatteh

Just a few tips to making this recipe for crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce for fatteh, a Middle Eastern breakfast dish comprised of leftovers that’s typically shared.

But first, I should say that while fatteh is traditionally a breakfast dish in the Middle East, it’s one of those rustic, home-cooked dishes that you can really eat at any time of the day, and it makes a comforting snack, lunch or cosy dinner in on the couch.

The recipe is super easy, so just a few tips. A lot of fatteh recipes call for the chickpeas to be simmered in water, but the chickpeas are so much tastier boiled in chicken stock and ground cumin.

We always seem to have a light chicken stock in the fridge, which we make from poaching chicken, but, sure you could use a store-bought chicken stock (dilute it) or stock cubes.

We also have jars of crispy pita chips on our kitchen shelves. I make the pita crisps from stale pita bread and they keep for weeks. You’ll find our recipe for home-baked crispy pita chips here and in the recipe below.

I season the pita chips quite heavily with spices when I oven-bake them, but if you’re making them from scratch for this recipe, you may want to keep them fairly plain as the chickpeas will be seasoned with salt and cumin, and you’ll be sprinkling sumac over the dish before serving.

Crispy Pita with Spiced Chickpeas and Yogurt Sauce

Crispy Pita, Spiced Chickpeas and Yogurt Sauce for Middle Eastern Fatteh

AuthorLara Dunston

This dish of crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce makes fatteh, a shared Middle Eastern breakfast dish comprised of leftovers. Stale pita bread is toasted to create crispy pita chips. Warm cumin-spiced chickpeas are spooned over the pita crisps, a lemony-garlic yogurt sauce drizzled over the chickpeas, and pan-roasted nuts sprinkled on top to make a Middle Eastern nachos.

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Prep Time 15 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Course breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack, dinner

Cuisine Middle Eastern food, Arabic food, Levantine food, Lebanese food, Syrian food

Servings made with recipeServings 4

Calories 738 kcal

Ingredients

  

1x2x3x

• 500 ml chicken stock
• 400 g (15 oz) can chickpeas - drained
• 1 tbsp tahini
• 3 garlic cloves - pounded
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp salt
• 200 g crisp pita chips – see recipe
• 2 cups natural yogurt
• 1 tbsp garlic - minced
• 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 30 g cashews
• 30 g pistachios
• 10 g pine nuts
• 1 tbsp fresh parsley or mint - finely chopped
• ½ tsp ground sumac

Instructions

 

• To a medium sized pot on the stove, add the chicken stock, chickpeas, tahini, pounded garlic cloves, extra virgin olive oil, ground cumin, and salt, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 15-20 minutes until the chickpeas are soft.
• If you don’t have any crispy pita chips, make those in the oven while the chickpeas are cooking, following this recipe; allow 10-15 minutes.
• Next, prepare the yogurt sauce in a container with a lid by stirring the natural yogurt, minced garlic and fresh lemon juice to combine well. Taste and season with a little salt if you like, then refrigerate until ready to assemble the dish.
• Lastly, to a small pan over medium, heat the olive oil, then add the cashews, pistachios and pine nuts, and stir to pan-roast for a few minutes, taking care not to burn the pine nuts and pistachios, then transfer to a small dish.
• To assemble the fatteh, on a large serving plate to share or in individual bowls, create a layer of pita chips, spoon on the chickpeas and spiced stock, drizzle on the yogurt sauce, sprinkle on the pan-roasted nuts, ground sumac and chopped fresh parsley, and serve immediately.

Nutrition

Calories: 738kcalCarbohydrates: 84gProtein: 30gFat: 33gSaturated Fat: 4gPolyunsaturated Fat: 7gMonounsaturated Fat: 19gTrans Fat: 0.02gCholesterol: 6mgSodium: 1310mgPotassium: 1017mgFiber: 11gSugar: 20gVitamin A: 167IUVitamin C: 9mgCalcium: 350mgIron: 7mg

Please do let us know if you make this crispy pita with spiced chickpeas and yogurt sauce recipe for fatteh as we’d love to hear how it turned out for you.