Harissa Tempeh
The Cava-style chicken marinade — lemon, honey, garlic, paprika, and cumin over harissa — on tempeh instead of thighs. Steamed first so it stops tasting bitter and starts drinking the marinade, then baked and broiled the same way. It comes out chewy and crusted at the corners, and it goes in exactly the same bowls.
Ingredients
Marinade
Instructions
- Cut each block crosswise into 1/2-in. planks, or into 3/4-in. cubes.
- Steam the tempeh over simmering water 10 min. Spread it out on a towel and let it dry and cool, about 5 min.
- Whisk the harissa, olive oil, water, lemon juice, honey, garlic, paprika, cumin, pepper, and salt together in a bowl or zip-top bag.
- Add the tempeh and turn to coat every surface. Refrigerate at least 30 min; 2 to 4 hours is better, overnight is fine.
- Heat the oven to 400°. Arrange the tempeh on a foil-lined sheet pan, spaced apart, and scrape any marinade left in the bag over it.
- Bake 20–25 min, flipping once at 12 min, until the edges darken and the surface looks dry rather than wet.
- Broil 2–3 min for color. Watch it — the honey goes from browned to burnt fast.
- Eat it hot or cool it for the fridge. No resting step; there's nothing to rest.
Notes
- Steam it first. Ten minutes over water is what separates tempeh worth marinating from tempeh that tastes faintly bitter and sits in a slick of marinade it never absorbed. Steaming drives off the ammoniated edge from the culture and opens the pores, so step 4 actually goes somewhere.
- Dry it after steaming. Wet tempeh dilutes the marinade and then steams itself again on the sheet pan instead of browning.
- 1 1/2× the chicken's marinade, and it still goes further than it looks: tempeh takes in essentially all of it, where the thighs shed a good share onto the foil. If your harissa is hot, or you're new to it, start at 2 Tbsp. and keep everything else where it is.
- The water is there to thin the marinade, not to stretch it. Oil alone is too thick to travel into a steamed block; the water carries the harissa in and bakes back out.
- Salt, unlike the chicken — this is the one place the two recipes disagree on purpose. Tempeh is 15 mg of sodium per 3 oz., which is nothing, and it has no fat or collagen of its own to read as savory. Half a teaspoon puts a serving at about 265 mg, still under a third of what a full teaspoon per pound would do, and still low enough for a bowl that also carries feta and hummus.
- Less oil than a straight scale-up would give you. A pound of tempeh brings 32 g of its own fat before anything is added; 2 Tbsp. is enough to crisp the edges without making it heavy.
- Cubes or planks: cubes have more surface area and come out with more crust, planks slice cleanly into a pita or lie flat on a bowl. Cubes for meal prep, planks for a sandwich.
- Honey keeps this vegetarian, not vegan. Maple syrup at the same 1 1/2 Tbsp. is a straight swap — slightly less browning under the broiler, no other difference.
- Foil-line the pan, same as the chicken. Honey plus harissa welds itself to bare metal.
- Uses homemade harissa paste, which is where all the heat comes from.
- Good with lemon herb tahini and cucumber tomato salad — the CAVA bowl, without the chicken.
Compared to the chicken
- Per serving: 332 cal, 25 g protein, 17 g fat, 21 g carbohydrate, 9 g fiber, 265 mg sodium, no cholesterol. The chicken is 287 cal, 30 g protein, 14 g fat, 8 g carbohydrate, 1.5 g fiber, 185 mg sodium, and 141 mg cholesterol.
- Close on protein, six times the fiber, and the cholesterol goes to zero. The extra carbohydrate is mostly the soybeans, not the honey.
- The nutrition here is worked from the Lightlife label — 160 cal, 18 g protein, 6 g fat, 6 g fiber, 15 mg sodium per 3 oz. — plus the ingredient list for the marinade, on the assumption that all of the marinade is eaten. With tempeh that assumption is close to true, which is not the case for the chicken.
- Servings are 4 here against the chicken's 3 from the same pound. Tempeh is denser and more filling; 4 oz. is a full portion where 5 oz. of chicken is.
Meal prep
- Two packs is four lunches. For a five- or six-lunch week, three packs and 1 1/2× the marinade again — 4 1/2 Tbsp. harissa, 3 Tbsp. oil and water, and so on. It still fits one sheet pan if you use cubes.
- Cook it whole on prep day and cool it uncovered before it goes in containers, same as the chicken. Sealing it warm softens the crust.
- It keeps better than the chicken does. Tempeh is a fermented product and it has no juices to lose; five to six days airtight is comfortable, and it freezes for 3 months without the texture changing much — which is not something poultry does well.
- Reheat in a skillet with a little olive oil, 3–4 min, to bring the edges back. The microwave works and goes soft, same trade as before.
- Steaming and marinating are the two waits. Start the steamer first, whisk the marinade while it runs, and the block is in the bag inside 20 min.
Nutrition
- Serving size
- 1/4 of the recipe, about 4 oz. tempeh
- Calories
- 332
- Protein
- 25 g
- Fat
- 17 g
- Saturated fat
- 2.6 g
- Carbohydrates
- 21 g
- Fiber
- 9 g
- Sugar
- 7 g
- Sodium
- 265 mg
- Cholesterol
- 0 mg
Estimated from the ingredient list, per serving. Not a substitute for a label.