Eighteen things an English-speaking cook meets in these recipes and cannot easily look up. What each one is, what it tastes like, what it is used in, how to buy and keep it — and what to do when you cannot find it.
The Sofra app carries an Ingredient Atlas covering most of these and dozens more — in English, Arabic and Portuguese, with the name in French and Spanish too — with substitutes, sourcing notes and a free collection of 112 recipes to cook from.
Get Sofra — free download →They are Levantine pantry staples that rarely have a settled English name. Kishk is cracked wheat fermented with yogurt and dried to a powder; mahlab is a baking spice ground from a cherry kernel; dibs rumman is pomegranate juice reduced to a tart syrup. Each has its own page here.
A Middle Eastern grocer will carry almost everything on this list, usually cheaper and fresher than a supermarket. Each ingredient page says where that particular item is stocked, what to look for and what a stale one looks like.
It depends on the ingredient, and some have no real substitute at all. Every page here lists the workable stand-ins with an honest note on how close each one gets — and says plainly when the answer is that nothing does.
Both. Sofra documents home cooking carried between Beirut and Idlib as one shared Levantine table, and these ingredients run through all of it. Where a particular ingredient has a strong regional association, the page says so.