Must try in Tunisia

Lablabi.

Name: Lablabi (Tunisian Chickpea and Bread Soup)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 1 h 25 min
Total time: 9 h 40 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Tunisia
Ingredients: 300 g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight; 8 cloves garlic — 4 whole for the pot, 4 for pounding at the end; 2 tbsp ground cumin; 1 bay leaf; 1.8 l water; to taste salt; 300 g stale dense white bread, torn into rough pieces; 4 eggs; 4 tsp harissa, or to taste; 6 tbsp good olive oil; 120 g canned tuna in oil, drained and flaked; 2 tbsp capers, rinsed; 60 g black or green olives, pitted; 1 lemon, in wedges; 15 g parsley, chopped

Tunisian Chickpea and Bread Soup

لبلابي · say it: lab-LAH-bee

Lablabi turns two cheap things — dried chickpeas and yesterday's bread — into one of the most satisfying bowls in North Africa. Chickpeas are simmered until soft with a lot of garlic and even more cumin, then ladled with their cooking liquid over torn stale bread so the bread collapses into the broth. Everything after that is assembly: harissa stirred in to taste, a splash of olive oil, flaked tuna, capers, olives, a soft egg broken over the top, lemon squeezed at the last second. It is savoury, garlicky and slightly muddy in the best way, and it costs almost nothing to make.

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Tunisian Chickpea and Bread Soup

Gate: TunisiaTunis
Prep: 15 min
Cook: 1 hr 25 min
Total time: 9 hr 40 min incl. 8 hr rest
Serves: 4
Status: Easy
Nutrition / serving · estimated: Calories 620 kcal; Protein 30 g; Carbs 68 g; Fat 26 g; Fiber 14 g; Sodium 840 mg

Why this recipe works.

Cooks the chickpeas from dry, which is the only way to get the cloudy, starchy broth the dish depends on.
Adds raw pounded garlic at the end as well as whole cloves at the start, the way lablabi shops do.
Bowls are assembled individually so everyone sets their own heat and toppings instead of eating one compromise.
Made almost entirely from store-cupboard ingredients and stale bread nobody wants to throw away.

Tips from our kitchen.

Add salt only once the chickpeas are already tender. Salted early, they stay stubbornly firm no matter how long they simmer.
A quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in the soaking water softens the skins and gives a creamier broth, especially with older chickpeas.
Do not thin the broth. It should be cloudy and slightly thickened by chickpea starch, not clear — if it looks like water, boil it down for ten minutes.
Tear the bread rather than cutting it. Ragged edges soak unevenly, which gives you both mushy and chewy pieces in the same spoonful, and that contrast is the point.
Cumin here is measured in tablespoons, not pinches. Under-cumined lablabi tastes like plain chickpea soup.
Assemble each bowl immediately before eating. Bread left standing in broth for ten minutes turns into a single soft mass.

Substitutions.

Dried chickpeas → 3 × 400 g tins of chickpeas plus 700 ml vegetable stock: Much faster, but the broth lacks body. Simmer the tinned chickpeas in the stock for 20 minutes and mash a handful against the pot to thicken it.
Stale round Tunisian bread → Any dense stale white bread, sourdough or a day-old baguette, oven-dried for 10 minutes: What matters is dryness and structure. Soft sandwich bread disintegrates on contact with the broth.
Tuna and egg → Leave both out and finish with extra olive oil and chopped preserved lemon: The vegan bowl is entirely legitimate — lablabi was poor food long before the toppings became standard.

Variations.

Lablabi bil bidh: The egg cracked raw straight into the boiling broth in the bowl, where it cooks in the residual heat and thickens everything as you stir it through.
Sfax-style: Heavier on the tuna and octopus, with more olive oil and often a spoonful of the tomato-and-chilli sauce used for local seafood.
Lablabi with kaddid: Topped with kaddid, Tunisian dried spiced meat, instead of tuna — a winter version from the interior rather than the coast.

Storage & reheating.

Keep the chickpeas in their broth for up to 4 days in the fridge and never store them with bread in it. The broth thickens as it sits, so loosen it with a little water when reheating and check the salt and cumin again, both of which fade. It freezes well for 3 months in the pot liquid alone; freeze in portions so you can build a single bowl on a cold morning without defrosting the lot.

Serve with

Extra harissa in a saucer, a wedge of lemon, and strong black coffee — this is a breakfast dish as much as a lunch one.

The story behind Lablabi.

This is working food, and Tunis has shops that sell nothing else. You go in, hand over your bowl, and watch it built: the counterman tears the bread himself, judges how much broth it needs, and asks how hot you want it. The chickpeas and their liquid are the only fixed part. Everything else is negotiated at the counter, which means no two bowls of lablabi in the same shop are identical, and regulars have standing orders down to the number of olives.

The name is shared with the Turkish leblebi, meaning roasted chickpeas — one of many food words that travelled with centuries of Ottoman administration — though the Tunisian dish itself is a soup and the Turkish word describes a dry snack. Similar bread-and-broth constructions turn up across the Mediterranean wherever stale bread had to be used up, from Spanish sopas to Italian ribollita. What makes lablabi specifically Tunisian is the seasoning: cumin far past the amount most cuisines consider reasonable, raw garlic pounded into the broth at the end rather than only at the start, and harissa as the adjustable element.

It is eaten mostly in the colder months and mostly in the morning, and there is a persistent association with the night before — a bowl of lablabi is the standard Tunisian answer to having stayed out too late. The bread should be genuinely stale, dense and dry enough to soak without dissolving instantly; fresh bread turns the whole thing to paste. Anyone who tells you a particular set of toppings is the correct one is describing their own neighbourhood, not a rule.

Questions, answered.

Do I have to soak the chickpeas overnight?

Overnight soaking gives the most even cooking and the creamiest broth, but a quick soak works: cover with water, boil for two minutes, cover the pot and leave for one hour. Unsoaked chickpeas can be cooked but take two to three hours and often stay unevenly firm.

What kind of bread should I use for lablabi?

Dense, dry, stale white bread — Tunisian khobz tabouna, a day-old baguette, or a country sourdough. It needs to be dry enough to hold its shape for a minute in hot broth before softening. If your bread is fresh, tear it up and dry it in a low oven for ten minutes first.

How spicy should the harissa be in the bowl?

That is deliberately left to the eater. In Tunis you are asked at the counter, and answers range from a smear to a full tablespoon. Start with a teaspoon stirred into the broth, taste, and add more — it is much easier to add heat than to rescue a bowl you have overloaded.

Can I make lablabi vegan?

Yes, and the base recipe already is. Leave out the tuna and the egg and finish with a heavier hand on the olive oil, plus capers, olives and preserved lemon for the salty, sour notes those toppings otherwise supply. The chickpea broth itself contains nothing animal.

Why is my broth thin and watery?

Either too much cooking water, or the chickpeas were not cooked long enough to release their starch. Simmer uncovered to reduce, and mash a ladleful of chickpeas against the side of the pot then stir them back in. The finished broth should coat a spoon faintly and look cloudy rather than clear.

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