Maakroun bil Toum: Lebanese Pasta with Garlic Toum Sauce

About this Recipe

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By: Rachel

Maakroun bil toum isn’t your everyday pasta dish—it’s rustic, unique, and deeply memorable. This Lebanese recipe pairs handmade pasta with creamy toum sauce and surprising mix-ins. At first bite, it’s good. But give it a day, and you’ll find yourself craving it all over again.

Discovering A Dish That Reveals Itself Over Time

Most of the time, when you have a great dish, it’s love at first bite. You know in those first few mouthfuls that the dish is wonderful. You appreciate the flavors, the textures. You savor it.

Every once in awhile, it doesn’t hit you until later. Yes, the dish is good, you enjoy it, maybe you finish it, maybe you don’t. But it’s not until a few hours later, maybe the next day, that the nuances really hit you.

You start going over those flavors in your mind. What was that spice, again? What was that sour flavor? The dish was so sneakily complex, the flavor combinations so unexpected, that you start thinking about it—and craving it—far more than is reasonable.

When a Dish Grows on You: My First Encounter with Maakroun bil Toum

That slow-burn effect I described? It hit me when I had the Maakroun bil Toum at Mara, Gavin Kaysen’s wonderful restaurant at the Four Seasons in Minneapolis. The dish consists of what appears to be an oddball combination of flavors and textures that ultimately work beautifully together.

And while I enjoyed the dish the first night I had it, it wasn’t until a day or two later when I really began to appreciate it. I kept thinking about those unique and thoughtful flavor combinations. In fact, I went back the following weekend to have the dish again.

After that, I simply had to recreate it at home because: 1) I wanted to keep eating it over and over again, and 2) eating at the Four Seasons is really expensive.

Recreating Maakroun bil Toum with Garlic Sauce at Home

First, let’s break the dish down. At its heart, this is a pasta dish—but not the kind you might expect. This isn’t your typical spaghetti or gnocchi. Maakroun bil toum is rooted in Lebanese home cooking, where simple ingredients come together in unexpectedly satisfying ways.

Maakroun: A Rustic Lebanese Pasta

When we think of pasta or gnocchi, most of us think of Italy—but maakroun is a simple, handmade pasta unique to the mountain villages of Lebanon. It contains just flour, salt, olive oil, and water. So it is naturally vegan, as is the sauce that accompanies it: the toum sauce. This pasta has a rustic, chewy texture that holds up well to bold sauces and mix-ins. Its simplicity makes maakroun the perfect pasta for the punchy flavors in this dish.

Toum: A Bold and Bright Garlic Sauce

Toum, the sauce, is an emulsion of garlic and oil with a squeeze of lemon (in case you’re wondering how to make toum sauce). It’s easy to make, as Serious Eats editor Sohla El-Waylly demonstrates. There are several excellent brands of toum on the market if you prefer not to make your own for your toum pasta. You can try your local Middle Eastern specialty market. Nowadays, many grocery stores carry this good-quality toum sauce.

If you’re interested in other handmade pastas, try my Easy Ricotta Gnocchi with Two Irresistible Sauces.

Bringing Maakroun bil Toum Together: Flavors That Surprise and Satisfy

This Maakroun bil Toum recipe also features simply grilled or seared zucchini, which adds smokiness and freshness, ground cherries for sweetness and acidity, and duck pastrami, which adds a gamey, salty note to the dish (regular pastrami works well too).

The dish comes together by adding toum sauce to a large bowl. Add in the hot, cooked maakroun and grilled zucchini, and toss to combine. The heat from these ingredients will take the edge off the intense raw garlic in the toum sauce. Then, stir in the pastrami and ground cherries.

The result is an incredibly satisfying, flavorful, unexpected, and well-balanced dish that will have you coming back for more… and more… and more.

Maakroun bil Toum

This dish, featuring Lebanese pasta combined with a host of unexpected flavors and textures, will keep you coming back for bite after bite.

5 from 1 vote

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Ready In 1 hour hr

Meal Type Pasta

Good For Lebanese, Seasonal

Yield 6 servings

Equipment

• Chef's Knife
• Cutting board
• Kitchen scale or measuring cups and spoons
• Measuring cups and spoons or kitchen scale
• Mixing bowls

Ingredients

  

1x2x3x

• 2 cups (240g) all-purpose flour
• ¾ teaspoon kosher salt
• ¾ cup (175mL) warm water
• 1 teaspoon + 1 tablespoon olive oil divided
• 1 medium zucchini
• 8 ounces (225g) toum
• ¼ pound (115g) thinly-sliced pastrami
• 8 ounces (225g) ground cherries (may be available as golden berries or cape gooseberries)

Step by Step Instructions

 

Step 1: Making the Maakroun (Lebanese Pasta)

• In a large bowl, combine the flour and salt. Make a well in the center, and add the water and 1 teaspoon olive oil.
  
• Using a silicone spatula (or your fingers), slowly incorporate the dry ingredients into the wet, working from the inside out.
  
• The dough should begin to come together. If it is too crumbly, add water a tablespoon at a time until the dough holds together without becoming sticky. (If it becomes too sticky, you will be able to remedy this during the kneading process).
  
• Knead the dough on a floured surface until it becomes smooth. Cover with plastic wrap or a towel, and allow to rest for 45 minutes before continuing.

  While the dough rests, continue preparing the other ingredients with Step 3 (below).

Step 2: Forming the Pasta

• Divide the dough into four balls, and roll into thin ropes.
  
• Use a knife to divide each rope into 1” (2.5cm) sections.
  
• Roll the small pieces between your palms to create an elongated shape. This pasta is meant to be rustic rather than uniform and perfect.

  Now use the dull side of a butterknife to press a groove into the center of each dumpling, which will help catch the sauce.
  
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Step 3

• Cut the zucchini into quarters, then chop to create medium chunks. Sauté in the remaining tablespoon olive oil until browned, salt lightly, and set aside.
  

Step 4

• Tear the pastrami into medium pieces, and set aside. Halve the ground cherries, and set aside.

  Add the toum to a large bowl, and set aside.
  

Step 5

• Boil the dumplings in a large pot for about 15 minutes—the dumplings will float.

  You can check for doneness by cutting a dumpling in half. When fully cooked, it will be uniform in color throughout. If it is darker in the center, it needs more time to cook.

  Do not drain. Remove carefully with a slotted spoon, and immediately add to the toum.

  Toss gently with a silicone spatula or wooden spoon, and allow to sit for 2 minutes (the heat from the pasta will take the edge off of the intense raw garlic flavor from the toum). Add the zucchini and pastrami, and toss again to combine.

Step 6

• Divide into serving bowls, and garnish each with golden berries. Serve immediately.