🥟 Meat sambousek
Meat sambousek are half-moon pastries filled with minced beef cooked with onion, warm spices and toasted pine nuts, then fried or baked until golden. The crust is crisp, the filling juicy and fragrant, with the pine nuts adding a buttery crunch. They are a favourite hot mezze in Lebanon and Syria, often served with lemon wedges.
Diets
Allergens
Contains (in a typical recipe):
What it is made of
Recipe
Ingredients
- 300 g ready bread dough or sambousek dough
- 300 g minced beef
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- 30 g pine nuts, toasted
- 1 tsp seven-spice mix, salt and pepper
- Oil for frying or brushing
Method
- Cook the onion in 1 tbsp oil until soft, add the beef and cook until browned; season and stir in the pine nuts. Let cool.
- Roll the dough thin and cut 8 cm circles.
- Fill each with a teaspoon of meat, fold into a half-moon and crimp the edge.
- Fry until golden or bake at 200 °C for 15–18 minutes. Serve warm with lemon.
How to make it lighter
- Bake the pastries with a light brush of oil instead of deep-frying them.
- Use lean minced beef and pour off any fat after browning.
- Keep the pine nuts to a small handful — 30 g of pine nuts is roughly 200 kcal.
History
Sambousek is the Levantine member of the large family of filled pastries known across the Middle East and South Asia, whose name traces back to the Persian sanbosag. In Lebanon and Syria it is a fixture of the mezze table and of bakeries, made in half-moon shapes with a crimped edge.
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Values are estimates per 100 g for a typical recipe; home and restaurant versions vary. Diets and allergens are worked out from the ingredients of a typical recipe — always check with whoever cooked the dish. Not medical advice. Nutrition data: Me Nutrition dish database v13. How we count →