Tunisian · Vegetarian
Kafteji
About this recipe
Tunisian cooking is intensely spice-forward by North African standards — harissa, caraway, coriander seed — applied across slow-stewed meats, tagines, and the couscous traditions that mark celebratory meals.
As a vegetarian dish, Kafteji is meatless but not minimal — built around vegetables, pulses, dairy, and grains that anchor every cooking tradition's day-to-day repertoire.
The scaler above resizes every ingredient to the number of servings you actually want; Cook Mode walks you through the recipe one step at a time with hands-free timers.
Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.
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Method
- Peel potatoes and cut into 5cm cubes.
- Pour 1-2 cm of olive oil into a large pan and heat up very hot. Fry potatoes until golden brown for 20 minutes, turning from time to time. Place on kitchen paper to drain.
- Cut the peppers in half and remove seeds. Rub a little olive oil on them and place the cut side down on a baking tray. Place them under the grill. Grill until the skin is dark and bubbly. While the peppers are still hot, put them into a plastic sandwich bag and seal it. Take them out after 15 minutes and remove skins.
- In the meantime, heat more olive oil another pan. Peel the onions and cut into thin rings. Fry for 15 minutes until golden brown, turning them often. Add the Ras el hanout at the end.
- Cut the pumpkin into 5cm cubes and fry in the same pan you used for the potatoes for 10-15 minutes until it is soft and slightly browned. Place on kitchen paper.
- Pour the remaining olive oil out of the pan and put all the cooked vegetables into the pan and mix. Whisk eggs and pour them over the vegetables. Put the lid on the pan so that the eggs cook. Put the contents of the pan onto a large chopping board, add salt and pepper and chopped and mix everything with a big knife.
Cooking notes
Most vegetable dishes scale linearly, but be mindful of pan crowding — vegetables that should brown will steam instead if packed too tightly.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Kafteji
Kafteji is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
Vegetarian recipes like Kafteji are among the easiest to scale because most ingredients respond linearly to multiplication. The main constraints are pan capacity (crowding causes steaming, not the browning the recipe assumes) and seasoning intensity (use 1.5× the salt and spices when doubling, taste, adjust upward).
This recipe calls for eggs, which are the trickiest ingredient to scale to non-integer multiples. A US "large" egg weighs about 50 g; if a fractional scaling lands on, say, 1.5 eggs, beat one egg and weigh 25 g of the beaten mixture rather than guessing. The same goes for halving recipes — half an egg is 25 g of beaten egg, not a dramatic estimate.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Kafteji
Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Kafteji is doing structurally — here's the practical version.
Substitution ideas
Eggs
For binding (cookies, quick breads, meatballs): 1 large egg ≈ 1 tbsp ground flaxseed + 3 tbsp water, rested 5 minutes until gelled — structurally closest to a real egg. For moisture without structure (cakes, brownies): ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce or mashed banana per egg, accepting some loss of rise.
For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.
Make-ahead and storage
Vegetarian dishes like Kafteji sit comfortably in the make-ahead window — they store and reheat better than meat-centric dishes. Refrigerate 3-4 days; freeze most pulse, grain, or cooked-vegetable preparations for up to 2 months. The exceptions are dishes with raw or barely-cooked elements (salads, fresh herbs, anything crispy) — those components should be added at serving time, not stored with the rest.
Recipe video
Kafteji
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Each opens in a new tab so the timer keeps running. The math is auditable on the guide page below each converter, with worked examples and where the numbers come from.
Volume
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OpenWeight
Grams, ounces, pounds, kilograms — exact for any ingredient, plus the volume-to-weight conversions for ~40 pantry staples.
OpenTemperature
Fahrenheit, Celsius, gas mark — translate any oven temperature, with notes on conventional vs convection.
OpenCooking time
The cube-root rule for scaling up, the differences between meat / cake / soup geometry, and sensible starting estimates.
OpenPan size
9-inch round vs 8-inch square vs 13×9. The math is surface area, not diameter — and the converter shows you both.
OpenLength
Inches and centimetres — for when a recipe says “cut into 1-inch pieces” and your ruler is metric.
OpenIngredient density
A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. The full table of ~40 staples, with sources.
OpenOpen in main scaler
Edit the recipe text, scale by serving count, and copy the result. Same parser as the in-page scaler, more room to work.
OpenFrom the journal
Original essays on the small details.
The why behind the technique — original writing on the ingredient and equipment choices that separate a good cook from a frustrated one.
Reading a recipe like a chef
The 30-or-so recipe terms that show up most often, decoded
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Cooking for one — scaling principles
The math, the practical realities, and the recipes designed for one from the start
Read essayMay 4, 2026
How long do leftovers actually last?
Beyond the USDA's 3–4 days: the variables that actually determine the safe window
Read essayMay 4, 2026
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Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.
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