BROWNBOOK

When Lebanese-American food blogger Bethany Kehdy started her culinary tour, Taste Lebanon, she wanted to show people a Lebanon that few tourists ever know: the inside of kitchens, bakeries and acres of farm fields that are responsible for some of the country’s best cuisine.

According to Kehdy, who lives in the UK, the lack of tourism to Lebanon has inhibited the spread of its traditional cuisine into mainstream Western food culture.While plenty of vegetarian-friendly restaurants have co-opted hummus, it would take some searching to find fattah – a dish of spiced yoghurt, eggplant or meat, and fried bread – outside of the Middle East. ‘When you travel somewhere you take that experience back: You want to cook it at home, and we haven’t had that kind of tourism for a while,’ she says. To change this, Kehdy started the Taste Lebanon tours in 2011 as a ‘personal and intimate’ look into the lives and kitchens of the Lebanese.

On the week-long tour, which runs twice a year, Kehdy brings tourists into the homes of Lebanese farmers, producers and other culinary enthusiasts, where guests learn firsthand about traditional cooking techniques and practices. Kehdy, and her band of foodies, traipse through Lebanon’s diverse landscapes, from mountain homes and thyme fields in the South to Beirut’s gourmet restaurants. She takes guests fishing on the Mediterranean Sea, teaches them to make mezzah, as well as watch demonstrations on a variety of Middle Eastern foods, from saj to basterma to kebbah. They visit souks, dairy farms, bakeries, olive groves, vineyards and an Arak distillery.

For Kehdy, the most important stop on the trip is a visit to Abu Kassem, the owner of Za’atar Zawtar. Kassem is one of the few Lebanese farmers who has domesticated wild za’atar (thyme) plants, which is usually only collected in the wild. The dried spice, also known as za’atar is made from a mixture of thyme, sumac, salt and toasted sesame seeds.

Kassem’s fields are in southern Lebanon, a Hizbollah-controlled area that was a main staging ground for the war with Israel in the 1980s and again in 2006. ‘I tell people I’m Lebanese and they’re like ‘Oh really, is it all bombs?’ And you really get these people who don’t know better,’ she says.  ‘So it shows them something different and it’s not very biased. I’m open throughout the tour, I laugh about the different things that make up Lebanon, and show them both sides, it’s not focused on the negative at all.’

Kehdy was raised in Lebanon during the civil war and lived on her father’s farm in the mountains. She says she spent countless days in the family kitchen, watching her grandmother, father and aunts prepare meals, spending hours spicing rice and coring zucchini to make mashy, a mezzah of rice wrapped in vine leaves, or cooked inside eggplant, peppers and zucchini.

In 2008 Kehdy launched Dirty Kitchen Secrets, a food blog that focused on updated Lebanese dishes. Lebanese cuisine is known as labour-intensive, with lengthy preparations and a tradition of slow cooking. But Kehdy’s blog makes ambitious dishes possible for novice cooks through beautifully photographed, easy-to-follow recipes. ‘I put things in the blog that are non-traditional, something my Middle Eastern friends can’t get from their mothers,’ says Kehdy. ‘I think I’m mostly trying to make the food more accessible and mainstream.’

A documentary following the intrepid Taste Lebanon gourmands across Lebanon’s diverse landscape is in the works and Kehdy is still accepting sponsors to fund the launch, but Batootta films, a Lebanese production house that created the Emmy Award-winning web series Shankaboot, has signed on to shoot and produce the project.  She has already gained support from the Ministry of Tourism, and Middle East Airlines and Medco. It will likely feature a contest selection of participants, to spend ten days traveling and tasting.

For those who have already been on the tour, Taste Lebanon has been a positive experience. ‘It was filled with real people, intriguing places and always, always amazing food,’ says Aoife Cox, who travelled with Kehdy last April.  ‘I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat,’ she concludes.

The Taste Lebanon tours run May 24 to June 1, 2012 and September 27 to

October 5, 2012. Cost is £1499 (Dh8700) for double (shared) occupancy, £1599 (Dh9300) for single occupancy. Visit www.tastelebanon.co.uk for more information.

Photographer: Sarka Babicka