The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Egyptian · Main

Fatta bil Lahma

  • Advanced
  • 45 min
  • roughly 3 of 4 for cost

bright · warm-spiced · aromatic · gently hot Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, warm spice humming through the middle, with warmth in the tail.

Ingredients

  • 1.2 kg lamb neck on the bone
  • 1 onion, halved
  • 4 green cardamom pods, 2 bay leaves, 1 g mastic, 6 black peppercorns
  • 300 g Egyptian short grain rice, rinsed
  • 2 rounds aish baladi, about 200 g, split and torn
  • 400 g tomato passata
  • 10 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 60 ml white vinegar
  • 70 g samna
  • 12 g salt

Equipment

Sheet pan

The skills inside

Frying the paste until the oil splitsThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testStraining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquid

Allergen screen

Found: dairy

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

  1. Cover the lamb with cold water, bring it up slowly and skim until the surface runs clear, then add the onion, cardamom, bay, mastic and pepper and hold at a bare simmer until a bone pulls free clean. Strain and keep the broth hot.
  2. Toast the torn bread in a little samna in a wide pan, or on a tray at 200C (390F), until it is dry to the centre, brittle and biscuit brown.
  3. Cook the rice in 1.5 parts strained broth to 1 part rice with samna and salt until craters open on the surface, then cover and rest it off the heat.
  4. Fry the crushed garlic in samna until it just takes colour, stand back and pour in the vinegar, let it boil hard for 30 seconds, then add the passata and cook it down until it darkens and tastes sharp rather than raw.
  5. Layer in a wide dish: bread first, a ladle of hot broth to wet it, then rice, most of the sauce, the meat, and the last of the garlic sauce over the top. Carry it straight to the table.

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.

Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes

  • It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
  • It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
  • It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
  • It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
  • Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.

Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.

Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes

  • It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
  • The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
  • The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
  • The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
  • Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.

Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.

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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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Fatta bil Lahma The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Egyptian kitchen