Dagga Gazawiyyah (Hot Tomato and Dill Salsa from Gaza)
Dagga Gazawiyyah is a tangy, herby and citrusy hot tomato and dill salsa from the heart of Gaza in Palestine.
- Prep time
- 10 min
- Cook time
- 1 min
- Yield
- 2 servings
- Difficulty
- MEDIUM
Ingredients
- 1 tsp dill seeds
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 5 g fresh dill (about 1 small handful)
- 2 medium cloves garlic
- 1 small shallot
- 3 green chillies (to taste, more or less up to you)
- 2 medium tomatoes (ripe but not too soft)
- 2-3 tbsp lemon juice
- 2-3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
Instructions
- 1
Lightly toast the dill seeds on low for 1 minute. Tip into the mortar you'll be using. Leave to cool while you get the other ingredients ready.Don't leave your dill seeds in the pan as they'll continue to brown and burn.
- 2
Peel, then chop up your garlic finely or use a crusher as I do in the video.Roughly chop your shallot, chillies, tomatoes and fresh dill. This will make the final pounding easier.
- 3
Add the salt to the toasted dill seeds in your mortar. Using your pestle, grind the dill and salt in a circular motion to until they're basically crushed to an almost fine powder. Shouldn't take you more than a minute.
- 4
Add the garlic, shallots, green chillies and dill and pound/grind until the aromatics are all ground to a semi fine mix.
- 5
Add the tomatoes, and lightly squash them with the pestle. How fine you crush the tomatoes is a matter of taste. As you can see in the images and video, I like them really squashed.You could squash half and leave half whole for the best of two worlds.* In the video, I only used 1 tomato, as I wasn't using as much garlic, shallot and fresh dill.
- 6
Add 2 Tbsp of the lemon juice and 2 Tbsp of the olive oil and mix well with a spoon.Taste and add more juice, olive oil or salt, if you fancy.