Sumac Rhus coriaria
Acidity you can sprinkle. Where a squeeze of lemon would make something wet, sumac makes it sour and leaves it dry.
Ingredient reference image: AI-generated. Recipe photography is my own.
In the kitchen
It goes on at the end
Sumac is a finishing seasoning, sprinkled over food after cooking the way you would use flaky salt. Cooked into a dish its brightness dulls and its colour goes muddy.
Use it where you would use lemon
It supplies acidity without liquid, which makes it right for grilled meat, roast vegetables, hummus, salads and eggs — anywhere a squeeze of lemon would work but would also make things soggy.
Steep it for a dressing
For fattoush and similar, soak the sumac in a little warm water for ten minutes, then use the red liquid in the dressing. You get more colour and a rounder sourness than from the powder alone.
Beyond the kitchen
ACIDITY BEFORE LEMONS
Sumac was the main souring agent across the Levant, Anatolia and the Roman Mediterranean long before lemons were widely available. Roman cooking used it much as we now use lemon juice.
TANNING AND DYE
The species name coriaria means of leather, and sumac leaves have been used for tanning fine leathers for centuries, notably in Sicily and Turkey. The plant also yields dyes in reds, browns and blacks.
ZA'ATAR
Sumac is one of the defining components of za'atar alongside sesame, salt and dried thyme or hyssop. Its sourness is what stops the blend tasting flat and dusty.
NOT POISON SUMAC
Poison sumac, Toxicodendron vernix, is an entirely different North American plant with white berries. Culinary sumac has red berries, and the two are not confusable in practice — but the shared name causes regular alarm.
A longer history
Rhus coriaria grows wild across the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, the Levant and Iran and has been gathered and used for thousands of years. Greek and Roman writers describe it, and Roman cooking relied on it heavily as a souring agent in the absence of citrus — Apicius calls for it repeatedly.
It remained central across the Levant, Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus while dropping almost entirely out of western European cooking as lemons became available. That divergence is why sumac reads as distinctly Middle Eastern today despite having been a standard Roman ingredient.
Turkey, Iran and Syria are the main producers. Western interest grew sharply from the 2000s with the popularity of Levantine cooking, and it is now a standard supermarket jar in much of Europe and North America — a return, in the Mediterranean at least, rather than a novelty.