Serves 2–3
Prep 10 min
Cook 25 min
Total 35 min
Level Easy
Shakshuka is one of those recipes that sounds exotic, looks impressive, and is actually one of the easiest things you can make. Eggs poached directly in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce, finished with crumbled feta and fresh herbs, served in the pan it was cooked in with enough bread nearby to make sure none of the sauce goes to waste. It is a single-pan dinner that takes half an hour and tastes like considerably more effort than that.
Its origins are North African — most likely Tunisian — though it has become a staple across the Middle East and particularly in Israeli breakfast culture, which is where most people in Europe first encounter it. The debate over who owns the dish is spirited and probably unresolvable. What is not debatable is that it is very good and you should make it more often than you currently do, which is probably never.
Ingredients
The sauce
3 tbsp olive oil
1 large white onion, diced
1 red pepper, diced
4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp sugar
2 × 400g tins whole plum tomatoes
Salt & pepper to taste
To finish
6 large eggs
100 g feta cheese, crumbled
1 small bunch flat-leaf parsley or coriander
1 tsp za’atar (optional but excellent)
Good bread to serve — pita, sourdough, anything
On the tomatoes: Use whole tinned plum tomatoes and crush them yourself in the pan rather than buying pre-chopped. Whole tomatoes are packed at peak ripeness and tend to have better flavour. Crushing them by hand gives you uneven pieces that create better texture in the finished sauce — some chunks, some purée, rather than a uniform paste.
Instructions
Build the base. Heat the olive oil in a wide, deep frying pan or shallow casserole over medium heat. Add the onion and red pepper with a pinch of salt and cook for 8–10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until completely softened and beginning to colour at the edges. Don’t rush this — a properly cooked soffritto base is what makes the sauce taste deep rather than raw.
Add garlic and spices. Add the sliced garlic and all the spices — cumin, smoked paprika, coriander, cayenne. Stir everything together and cook for 90 seconds until the spices are fragrant and toasted slightly. The pan will smell extraordinary. This blooming of the spices in fat is what releases their full flavour — adding them with the liquid later gives you a fraction of the impact.
Add the tomatoes. Pour in both tins of tomatoes. Crush each whole tomato with the back of a wooden spoon or squeeze them with your hand directly into the pan. Add the sugar, season with salt and pepper, and stir well. Bring to a simmer and cook uncovered for 12–15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has thickened and the raw tomato taste has cooked out. Taste and adjust the seasoning — it should be deeply flavoured and slightly spicy.
Make wells for the eggs. Use a spoon to create six evenly-spaced wells in the surface of the sauce. The wells should be deep enough to cradle each egg — push the sauce aside rather than just making a dimple. Crack one egg into a small bowl first to check for shell, then slide it gently into the well. Repeat for all six eggs. Season each egg with a small pinch of salt.
Cover and cook the eggs. Put a lid on the pan and cook over medium-low heat for 5–8 minutes. The timing depends entirely on how you like your yolks. Check at 5 minutes — the whites should be fully set and opaque, and the yolks should still be slightly wobbly when you nudge the pan. If you prefer fully set yolks, give it another 2–3 minutes. The eggs continue cooking briefly after you remove the lid, so pull them just before your target.
Finish and serve from the pan. Remove from heat. Scatter the crumbled feta over the top, then the fresh parsley or coriander. A pinch of za’atar if you have it. Bring the pan directly to the table — shakshuka is a communal dish, served from the pan it was cooked in, with bread alongside for scooping. It does not transfer well to individual bowls without losing something essential about it.
Notes & Variations
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Adjust the heat to your preference. The base recipe has a mild to moderate heat from the cayenne. For more spice, add a finely chopped fresh chilli with the garlic, or increase the cayenne to ½ tsp. For a milder version, leave out the cayenne entirely — the smoked paprika still gives warmth without much heat.
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Green shakshuka: Swap the tomato base entirely for a sauce made from spinach, courgette, leek, and green chilli, cooked down with garlic and cumin. The eggs are poached in this green sauce instead. Topped with feta and tahini it becomes something completely different — lighter, brighter, and just as good.
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Merguez shakshuka: Slice and fry two or three merguez sausages in the pan before the onion and use the rendered fat as your cooking fat. Add the sausage pieces back in when you add the tomatoes. The lamb and harissa in the sausages amplify the spice profile significantly and turn this into a more substantial meal.
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Make the sauce ahead. The tomato base keeps in the fridge for 4–5 days and freezes perfectly. On a weeknight you can reheat the sauce from cold in the pan, crack the eggs in, and have dinner in ten minutes. This makes shakshuka genuinely useful as a weeknight staple rather than a weekend project.
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The bread is not optional. The sauce is too good to leave in the pan. Pita bread, torn flatbread, thick sourdough, a crusty baguette — anything that can be used to scrape and scoop. Serving shakshuka without bread is technically possible and spiritually wrong.
Do not walk away once the eggs go in. The difference between a perfectly set white with a runny yolk and a fully cooked, chalky yolk is about two minutes. Shakshuka has a narrow window of perfection and it does not wait. Stay at the stove, keep the lid on, and check at five minutes.
A dish for any time of day
This is one of those recipes that makes no distinction between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which means it works for all three — and it is particularly good for the in-between moments, the lazy Sunday afternoon when you want something that feels like a proper meal without committing to the full production of one. One pan, thirty-five minutes, deeply spiced, with eggs cooked just right in a sauce you want to eat with a spoon. If you have a can of tomatoes and some eggs you can make this. You almost certainly have both.
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