Yemeni & the Gulf · Main
Harees
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 400 g whole wheat berries, soaked overnight
- 600 g lamb shoulder on the bone
- 1.8 litres water
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 small cinnamon stick
- 80 g samn (clarified butter), melted
- ground cinnamon and sugar, to serve
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSoaking dried goods back to life
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · 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
- Drain the soaked wheat and put it in a heavy pot with the lamb, salt, cinnamon and water; bring to the boil and skim off the grey foam.
- Hold it at the barest simmer with the lid ajar for about 3 hours, until a grain smears between your fingers with no chalk left in the middle and the meat collapses into threads. 180 min
- Fish out the bones, gristle and cinnamon.
- Beat the pot over low heat with a wooden mallet or the back of a heavy spoon, working against the side, until wheat and meat lose their separate identities and the mass pulls away from the pot in one glossy sheet.
- Spread it in a shallow dish, hollow the centre and pour in the melted samn until it pools; dust with cinnamon and sugar at 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.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
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
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.