We’ll be honest from the first line: we’re not American. We’re a team of home cooks in Tunisia who fell hard for American home cooking.
The roast chickens. The sheet-pan dinners. The desserts on every holiday table. We decided to learn it properly, and “properly” is the whole point of this site.
Why we started
American food writing online is crowded, and a lot of it is careless. You look up a Food Network favorite, click the top result, and find a recipe that reads like nobody actually made it.
- Vague amounts.
- A cooking time that’s plainly wrong.
- Five hundred words of filler before a single instruction.
So we do the boring thing nobody else wants to do. We cook every recipe ourselves, from the real source, before we publish a word.
One rule holds the whole site together: if we can’t trace a dish back to the chef who created it, the real cookbook or episode, it doesn’t go on the site.
How a recipe gets here
Every dish goes through the same kitchen before it reaches you.
- Test. Imene and Sabrine read the chef’s own recipe the whole way through, then cook it and note what really happens: the step that takes twice as long, the seasoning the recipe forgot, the trick that made it work.
- Write. Dorra turns those messy notes into clear steps you can follow without second-guessing.
- Shoot. Bilel photographs the actual plate we cooked, the same day. Never a stock image.
- Check. Hamma reviews the words and the photo, and Hamdi has the last say before it goes live.
It’s slow. That’s the idea.
The people behind it
Plated Together is built by the team at Zaytouna Studio, the food-content studio we run from Tunisia. We’ve cooked and built food sites together for years.
- Imene Dridi, recipe tester and writer. Trained at L’Académie des Chefs in Tunis and does most of the testing. Facebook
- Sabrine Hajri, recipe tester and writer. Also trained at L’Académie des Chefs, patient with the bakes that fail twice before they behave. Facebook
- Dorra Thabet, recipe writer. Turns the test notes into clear steps, nothing assumed, nothing skipped. Facebook
- Mohamed Thabet (Hamma), editor. The last set of eyes on the words and the photo before anything publishes. Facebook
- Bilel Saidani, photographer and social. Shoots every dish the day we make it. Every photo here is his. Facebook
- Mohamed Shili, co-founder and tech. Built the site and keeps it running. Facebook
- Hamdi Saidani, founder and editor-in-chief. Sets the standard and has the final say on what publishes. Facebook
The chefs we cook from
We learn from the best American home cooks and Food Network names, from Ina Garten to Ree Drummond, and we always tell you exactly whose recipe a dish came from.
Plated Together is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any chef featured here. Every recipe is adapted from publicly available cookbooks, shows, and official sites, with full credit to the original creator. The original work belongs to its author. If you’re a rights holder with a concern, contact us and we’ll sort it straight away.
Say hello
Made one of our recipes? Found something we got wrong? We read every message. Reach us on the contact page.