I have always loved to experiment with food and cooking. Growing up in an Egyptian household, that always meant straying away from the traditional and finding a recipe off the beaten track or a dish inspired by foreign cuisines. If I wanted molokheya, I wasn’t going to be the one to cook it. Recently, however, I moved out of my family home and found myself suddenly at an impasse: I missed the traditional, quintessentially Egyptian foods I had grown up with, but I had never learned how to cook any of them. Of course, I could still have them when I visited my family, but this inability to satisfy my own food cravings in my own home felt like a real gap in my cooking resumé. And so, I embarked on a journey through the internet to discover the most authentic and accessible Egyptian cooking tutorials. The result, in retrospect, should not have surprised me. The polished, highly professional, aesthetically pleasing videos I was used to from Instagram Reels and TikToks were nowhere to be found. Neither were English terminology or imported ingredients. Instead I was met with warm, friendly voiceovers…
