50 Best Ramadan Recipes

Ramadan is one of the most important holidays in the Islamic faith, but as far as food traditions go, the focus is more on lack of food. For an entire month, the faithful are forbidden from eating from sunrise through sunset. While only adults are obligated to fast, many children participate, as well. There are, however, two daily meals: Iftar, which is the breaking of the fast once the sun goes down, and suhoor, which is the last meal eaten just before the break of dawn.

There is only one hard and fast tradition surrounding these Ramadan meals, and that is that the first food item consumed at an iftar meal should be dates. This is in honor of the prophet Muhammad, as it was his custom to break a fast with this fruit. There's also a sound nutritional reason behind doing so – dates help to raise blood sugar levels as these may have fallen after a day-long fast. Apart from the dates, there are no strict rules covering what is eaten at either iftar or suhoor other than that it must adhere to Islamic dietary laws, meaning pork and alcohol are verboten. Needless to say, you won't find either of these in any of the recipes on this list. Instead, we're focusing on a variety of dishes from countries throughout the Muslim diaspora. These include foods from the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Black Muslim community right here in the U.S.

Hummus and pita bread go together like the Middle Eastern equivalent of peanut butter and jelly. Well, to be more accurate, peanut butter and bread, but that's not how the idiom goes. If you're going to the trouble of making homemade pita bread, why not take a few extra minutes to whip up some super-simple hummus, as well? This recipe is for the basic type where the chickpea and tahini base is flavored with lemon and garlic, but you can always jazz it up with spices like cayenne, cumin, or smoked paprika and/or give it a garnish of fresh mint or cilantro.

Recipe: Lemon Hummus

Fasting can be tough on the body, particularly if Ramadan takes place during the warmer months of the year when days are long. All the more important, then, is powering up in the pre-dawn hour with the nutrients needed to help you get through the day. These no-bake energy bites are packed with chia seeds, walnuts, peanut butter, and dates and dipped in chocolate to make for a delicious, nutritious, and super-quick suhoor meal. Be sure to keep a supply of these on hand if you're inclined to hit the snooze alarm and aren't left with much time to prepare breakfast before starting the day's fast.

Recipe: Easy No-Bake Energy Bites

It's important to break your fast with beverages as well as foods, and a yogurt drink like lassi will not only help you rehydrate but can provide calcium, protein, and probiotics, as well. Mangos also have plenty of nutrients of their own – in fact, one serving of this mango lassi recipe has enough of this fruit to supply half of your day's vitamin C. Try this refreshing drink as an iftar thirst quencher or as a healthy suhoor smoothie to set you up for the day.

Recipe: Traditional Mango Lassi

Chicken shawarma is a dish that originated in Turkey, a country whose population is 99% Muslim. It is now known and loved throughout the Middle East (and Europe and the U.S., too), as a popular street food. While the real deal needs to be cooked on a giant meat cone, that's not really something you can replicate at home. Instead, this shawarma-style chicken is cooked in an Instant Pot.

Recipe: Easy Chicken Shawarma

No matter what you have planned for your iftar entrée, you'll probably want a few sides to go along with it. As is, these simple roast carrots pair nicely with chicken, beef, or lamb, but you can also put them to use in other recipes. Dice them into a rice dish, use them in a salad, or even puree them with a splash of cream and some seasonings to make a tasty carrot soup.

Recipe: Roasted Carrots

Are you familiar with tabbouleh, the national dish of Lebanon? If not, it could best be described as a cross between a salad and a grain dish as its bulgur wheat base is augmented with chopped fresh vegetables and green herbs. There are a number of different versions of tabbouleh, but our recipe mixes onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, and parsley with pre-cooked bulgur and dresses the mixture with olive oil and lemon juice.

Recipe: Tabbouleh

Shakshuka is typically made with spicy tomato sauce, but the version here shakes things up by going with a very mild, nutmeg-flavored spinach sauce instead. It cooks up just as quickly as the standard type of shakshuka, though, and with two different cheeses (feta and parmesan) plus eggs plus spinach, it's packed with protein. As nutritious as it is, this green shakshuka can help revitalize you after your fast and can also prepare you for the coming one should you wake up in time to cook it for suhoor,

Recipe: Green Shakshuka

While your iftar meal should primarily consist of nutritious foods to replenish you after a day's fast, having a well-deserved sweet treat like this honey-soaked baklava won't come amiss. We typically associate baklava with Greek restaurants, and yet variants of the pastry are known throughout the Middle East. Our easy-to-make version uses frozen puff pastry as a shortcut and puts an American spin on this dessert by using pecans, but you can swap these nuts out for the more traditional walnuts or pistachios if you prefer.

Recipe: Baklava

Biryani is a dish strongly associated with the Muslim communities of South Asia, thus making it an ideal choice for a festive iftar meal. There are many different types of biryani, but ours is a somewhat simplified American version – emphasis on the "somewhat," as it still calls for 20 different ingredients. These ingredients, though, which include chicken, basmati rice, and seasonings such as coriander, garam masala, and turmeric, can be found in any standard supermarket. Well, the saffron might not be so readily available, but it's super-expensive anyway so you might just want to swap this pricey spice out for a little more turmeric, anyway.

Recipe: Chicken Biryani

This egg dish, as its name implies, does come from Turkey – this isn't always a given with recipe names, though, as Russian dressing's not from Russia and French fries are hardly exclusive to France. Still, the Turks should be proud to claim this recipe as it turns out that fried eggs partner perfectly with garlicked-up yogurt. Our version is further dressed up with smoked chile brown butter and can make for an extra-flavorful entrée for either iftar or suhoor.

Recipe: Turkish Eggs

Butter chicken was possibly created by a Pakistani chef in a restaurant in India. The recipe is also a far more complex one than the name would imply, as in addition to butter, the chicken is cooked in a tomato-cream sauce and flavored with a laundry list of spices including chili powder, cumin, curry powder, garlic, and ginger. There's no need to worry about sourcing the seasonings, though, as our version requires only the kind that can readily be purchased in an American supermarket. We're also preparing this dish the easy way by letting a slow cooker do most of the work.

Recipe: Slow Cooker Butter Chicken

While the Philippines is a country with a Christian majority, Islam is a significant minority religion. So much so, in fact, that plans are currently underway to establish Mindanao as an autonomous Muslim-governed region. At a Filipino iftar dinner, you may see a traditional dish such as lumpia, which is similar to egg rolls or spring rolls. Lumpia can have a wide variety of fillings, but the ones in this recipe are made with a meat-free blend of bean sprouts, cabbage, carrots, green beans, and jicama.

Recipe: Fresh Vegetable Lumpia

Tandoori chicken may be one of the earliest known Pakistani dishes – the Times of India reports that archaeologists have unearthed both clay ovens and chicken bones from 5,000-year-old ruins in Harappa. Its popularity in modern times, however, is due to the efforts of a Pakistani restaurateur in the 1940s. While our homemade version is technically not true tandoori chicken as it's made without a tandoor (clay oven), these oven-baked thighs in a spicy yogurt coating do have a flavor reminiscent of this favorite restaurant dish.

Recipe: Easy Tandoori Chicken

Chai tea is, of course, the very best beverage to drink after practicing tai chi. (It seems like we've made that joke before ... and will undoubtedly do so again since food dad jokes 'r' us.) It also makes for a great post-fasting pick-me-up for iftar, or else a right-before-fasting eye-opener for suhoor. While there are many pre-made chai tea mixes and teabags available for purchase, here we're going old-style by crushing our own cardamom, cloves, and pepper, then simmering them with ginger, milk, and black tea. You should probably pass on the vanilla extract, though, as it may not be considered halal due to the alcohol it contains. What's more, vanilla isn't really a traditional chai ingredient anyway, but may have been introduced by Starbucks to add some familiar American flavor to this South Asian drink.

Recipe: Warm And Spicy Chai Tea

While rice may be the universal starchy side dish, it has other culinary uses, as well, and its best-known side gig may be a starring role in rice pudding. In Middle Eastern countries, rice pudding may be served at suhoor in order to fill up the faithful before a day of fasting. Our version is more American-style, flavored as it is with vanilla extract, but you can always leave out this ingredient (which, as we mentioned, may not be halal, anyway). If you replace the vanilla with rosewater and/or orange blossom water and then top the pudding with a sprinkling of chopped pistachios, you'll have a more Middle Eastern-style dish.

Recipe: Rice Pudding

Pancit may be Chinese in origin, but this noodle dish by now is a typically Filipino creation. Pancits exist in numerous different varieties, some of which include ingredients such as fish balls and pork liver, although the latter ingredient is obviously not eaten by Muslims. This pancit recipe, however, includes ingredients that are not only familiar to Americans but are also entirely halal (as long as the meat comes from a halal market, that is — Islamic law requires that meat be processed in a very specific way). The noodles are topped with chicken, cabbage, carrots, and onions and the dish is cooked in sweetened soy sauce. Pair this pancit with lumpia and you'll have a flavorful Filipino-style iftar meal.

Recipe: Authentic Pancit

If you can't find the preserved lemons necessary to make Moroccan-inspired branzino, don't worry, they're surprisingly easy to DIY. Basically, all you need to do to preserve a lemon is to cut it open, stuff it with salt, and then soak it in lemon juice. It will take some time until they're done, though — about 3 weeks, or approximately 75% of Ramadan. The preserved lemons should last for up to 6 months, though, which will give you plenty of time to figure out what you're going to do with them. Not only do they work well in fish dishes, but they can also be used anywhere you want some salty-slash-sour flavor.

Recipe: Easy Preserved Lemons

Satay, a popular street food made of skewered chicken, is considered to be the national dish of Indonesia. As it happens, this Southeast Asian country has the world's largest Muslim population — over 207 residents, which amounts to about 13% of the world's Muslims. It's only right, then, that we have at least one Indonesian-style iftar dish on the menu, even if it's interpreted through the filter of the American-Chinese chain P.F. Chang's. While an authentic Asian-style satay might be somewhat complicated to make, this Americanized recipe makes use of easy-to-source ingredients such as canned coconut milk, peanut butter, and sriracha sauce.

Recipe: Satay-Style Chicken Lettuce Wraps

While panang curry is thought of as a Thai dish, it may have originated in Malaysia, and Malaysia is most definitely a Muslim country. Therefore, panang curry gets a shout-out as we dine our way around the diaspora. Our version of this red chicken curry is not too difficult to make as long as you can get hold of some panang curry paste or at least a red Thai curry paste. Kaffir lime leaves are also nice to have, but you can always use bay leaves supplemented with ½ teaspoon of grated lime zest if you can't find them

Recipe: Panang Curry

Bean pie, true to its name, is a dessert pie made from mashed beans — navy beans, in the original version, although our recipe calls for the similar cannellini ones, instead. The pie was inspired by the views and writings of Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, and was a favorite of another famous Muhammad, the boxer Muhammad Ali. The beans themselves really don't influence the taste to any great extent (a bit less than the chickpeas used in dessert hummus, we'd say), so what you're really tasting here is the cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar used to flavor them.

Recipe: Creamy Bean Pie

This three-ingredient recipe is incredibly easy to make as it starts off with store-bought hummus. Ingredients two and three consist of pumpkin puree (canned is fine) and pumpkin pie spice — stir them together, and you have a savory dip well-suited to pita bread and raw vegetables. With the addition of sugar as a fourth ingredient, though, you can have a pumpkin pie dessert hummus that would pair perfectly with cinnamon-sugar pita chips.

Recipe: 3-Ingredient Pumpkin Hummus

These pan-seared chicken thighs are marinated in a Moroccan-inspired spice blend of allspice, cayenne, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, garlic, and smoked paprika. This recipe is a twofer, though, or perhaps even a threefer, as it also includes instructions for making a side of mint and parsley-flavored couscous as well as a selection of roast vegetables: onions, tomatoes, and zucchini. In less than 45 minutes, all of the elements come together to make for an entire iftar meal.

Recipe: Moroccan Chicken With Roasted Vegetable Couscous

While we may think of tapioca pudding as an American or perhaps a British dish, tapioca itself is Brazilian and is an ingredient used in Asian countries including Indonesia and Malaysia. While this recipe doesn't adhere to any particular culinary tradition, it does make use of coconut milk, which is a staple in Southeast Asian cooking, as well as cardamom, a popular Middle Eastern spice. Top the pudding with fresh fruit (mango and blueberries are shown here) to make a delicious iftar dessert or even a suhoor breakfast treat.

Recipe: Coconut-Cardamom Tapioca Pudding

Sinigang is a beef stew flavored with an ingredient that's a staple in Filipino cooking: tamarind fruit, which has a tangy, yet slightly sweet, flavor. To make this easy sinigang, we're starting with a mix that already contains powdered tamarind, so there's no need to track down the actual fruit or figure out how to prepare it. Along with the sinigang mix, the beef is simmered in a crockpot with potatoes, green beans, and bok choy, then finished off with a dash of fish sauce. This recipe makes a fairly large amount (10 servings), but the tasty leftovers can last you through several iftar meals.

Recipe: Slow Cooker Beef Sinigang

You may recall Turkish delight as the candy that led to Edmund's downfall in "The Chronicles of Narnia," but it's not exclusive to White Witches and other storybook baddies. Instead, this candy has been delighting Turks (and others) since the days of the Ottoman Empire. The ingredients involved in this recipe are actually pretty basic as it calls for nothing more than cornstarch, cream of tartar, lemon juice, sugar (granulated and powdered), and water, but the candy can be made even more delightful by stirring in some rosewater and maybe a handful of chopped pistachios.

Recipe: Turkish Delight