Iraqi · Main
Dolma Iraqiyya
- Advanced
- 75 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, settling low and earthy.
Ingredients
- 300 g medium grain rice, rinsed
- 300 g minced lamb
- 2 onions, finely chopped
- 4 tomatoes, 2 chopped and 2 sliced
- 60 g tomato paste
- 40 g flat leaf parsley, chopped
- 20 g dill, chopped
- 2 tsp baharat
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- 80 ml sunflower oil
- 60 g tamarind paste, loosened in 500 ml hot water
- 2 large onions, boiled whole and separated into layers
- 3 small aubergines, hollowed
- 3 small courgettes, hollowed
- 3 green peppers, seeded
- 200 g vine leaves in brine, rinsed
- 300 g lamb ribs
- 2 tsp salt
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Rolling dolmasBrining & curingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix the rice, lamb, chopped onion, chopped tomato, tomato paste, parsley, dill, baharat, turmeric, oil and salt with your hands until every grain is stained orange and the mass moves as one.
- Fill each vegetable shell and each vine leaf two thirds full and no more, rolling the leaves tight but leaving the parcels slack enough to dent under a thumb.
- Lay the lamb ribs and the sliced tomato across the base of a heavy pot, pack the parcels in upright layers so they brace each other, and set a heatproof plate on top to hold them down.
- Pour the tamarind water down the side of the pot until it reaches the top layer, bring it to a bare simmer, cover and hold it on the lowest heat until a test parcel has no chalk left in the rice, about 90 minutes. 90 min
- Rest the covered pot off the heat for 10 minutes, then invert it onto a wide tray in one movement so the ribs and tomato come out on top. 10 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet or Rioja Reserva
- Also Right
- Malbec
- From the Taps
- Porter
- Zero-Proof
- Pomegranate spritz
Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.
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