What do you think of when you think of Tunisian food? How often do you think of Tunisian food? Do you ever do it while eating Thai food?
These are all questions I never thought I’d ask. But life is full of things I never thought I’d do. Writing a blog about Tunisian food is certainly one of them. Doing octopus cartwheels while drinking lemonade in space was certainly another.
But I digress (or at least I’ll try to). When you do think of Tunisian food, do you think of harissa, merguez, cous cous and the like? Perhaps even an occasionally guilty bambalouni (i.e. fried donut covered in sugar) pleasure? Those with an advanced degree might conjure up some ojja or lablebi even?
BUT when thinking of Tunisian food, how much do you think about sandwiches? Like 5% of the time? 13.7%? I mean with the plethora of other mind-altering dishes, why would you? You’d probably be certifiably insane to even consider such a notion.
Or at least that’s what I thought, prior to 25 May 2025. That was the day my entire world was blown apart, the day I realized that everything I hitherto had known about Tunisian food was a by-product of a conspiracy perpetrated by commercialized big pharma. The day I realized I would probably never be the same.
In other words, what I am trying to say is who knew Tunisians were so into sandwiches? Before May 2025, this humble scribe certainly did not!
But yet they are. In fact they are big time. So big it should make international headlines. But alas, big pharma is still out to get us.
This is my attempt to cut through all the morass and show the world what it needs to see. Tunisia and sandwiches are a match made in heaven, or two peas in a pod of carbohydrates. How it all began, no one will ever know. All we can do is try to sort out the present.
Yet it is not that simple. In fact it never is. Tunisians are so into sandwiches, but they deliberately obfuscate the fact, making it as confusing as possible so no one – especially big pharma – realizes. The breads change, the fillings do not correspondingly transfer from one type to another and different areas name the same thing differently. The variety of breads that adorn an ever more perplexing set of fillings creates a mental challenge that even the monkey scientists behind ChatLGBT would find difficult to process.
Alas, while Tunisian sandwiches are indeed everywhere in Tunisia, they can be downright confounding. Many do come with french fries, which are delicious. But that just distracts from the fact that you have no idea what is going on.
Luckily for you (and if you are still reading this you are in desperate need of luck), I have sorted it all out. Or at least what I could over the course of fourteen days. Which in sandwich years, really is not that much given I hit my daily carb overload limit most days by 10:40am.
But it is a start. A work some noble voyagers can continue for the benefit for human enlightenment (skip to the bottom for the pictures – you, I and the recently sentient malware you installed by clicking on this blog all know you want to).
LIST OF TUNISIAN SANDWICHES AS FAR AS I CAN TELL
- Baguette – normal sandwich
- Baguette farcie – pizza dough with fillings baked together
- Mlawi – thin wrap with fried dough
- Chapati – round bread
- Chapati mahdiya – like a calzone (chami? Chapatino in Sousse)
- Tabouna – round, thicker bread cooked in tabouna
- Malfouf – pressed tortilla wrap (aka Taco?)
- Makloub – pizza dough folded over
- Cornet – loosely rolled flatbread into cone shape (rare)
- Libanese – normal tortilla wrap
- Mtabga – Berber pizza (two small round breads filled with sauce)
- Soufflé – ???
(PARTIAL?) LIST OF COMMON FILLING OPTIONS
- kafteji – fried veggies
- escalope – meat beaten until flat (like milanesa)
- shawarma
- kebab – minced meat
- salami/jambon/kwika
- merguez – lamb sausage
- tuna
- omlette (azm)
- cheese (jbn)
- lablabi – baguette only
- dinde – turkey
- ayeri – soft boiled egg, cheese, harissa
- mraweb – half cooked egg
The baguette is the staple, an evident legacy of French colonialism. It can be filled with just about any filling but the kafteji – a combination of stir-fried vegetables, one of the guaranteed vegetarian friendly sandwiches – is only found in a baguette. The time I asked in Tataouine (yes, the Star Wars planet) for kafteji in a mlawi became an instant part of local folklore, of which parents will use to regale their youth for generations to come.
Many sandwiches are the wrap variety. Tortilla-style circle wraps or in the mlawi case a fried square version provides a nice thin and round complement to meat fillings like escalope (beaten and fried thin meat), kebab (obvious), tuna (everywhere), and kwika (i.e. Tunisian spam).
Thicker but still round tabouna bread – cooked in a tabouna pot – seems to be the more localized sandwich original, yet is not the most common to find. A tabouna with ayeri – egg, cheese and harissa – such as this one in Kairouan – makes for something divine.
Then there are the pizza dough varieties, some which non-Italians would describe as calzone-like. You can bake them together, fold them over or seal them and come up with a different name for all. The fillings tend to be the same combination – minus the kafteji of course as that would just be insane. A heartier sandwich option for those who need to fill up their hearts (with cholesterol).
Finally there are some wildcards. Mtabga for example, known as Berber pizza, might not qualify as a sandwich in the traditional sense. But in case you haven’t noticed, we are anything but traditional here. Consisting of two round flat breads cooked together with a small paste of tomatoes and onions in between, it is a specific combination found mostly in the Berber-inhabited southern regions.
Then there are those that got away. The soufflé escaped us – not as common as its cousins, we mostly saw it on menus at fast food pizza joints. Alas fourteen days was not enough to work it into the schedule. The mystery will haunt us.
If all of this is bending your mind to the brink of explosion, that is by design (thanks big pharma). But the handy flowchart below should ease the burden and bring you back to a semi coherent state of consciousness.
And with that, I present to you Omar’s half-baked flowchart guide to the perfect Tunisian sandwich!!
MORE PICTURES FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO SEE THINGS THEY CANNOT TASTE
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