Armenian · Main
Harisa
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a warm current of chile, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 1 chicken, about 1.6 kg
- 500 g korkot, hulled and cracked wheat
- 3 litres water
- 20 g salt
- 150 g butter
- coarse black pepper
The skills inside
Salted water & the float testSkimming: foam, fat and a clear broth
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
- Rinse the korkot and soak it in cold water for at least 2 hours, then drain. 120 min
- Simmer the whole chicken in the salted water, skimming the grey foam, until a leg pulls free of the carcass, about 1 hour 15 minutes. 60 min
- Lift the bird out, strip every scrap of meat back into the broth and discard the skin and bones.
- Add the drained wheat and cook uncovered on the lowest heat, stirring up from the base with a flat wooden spoon every few minutes, until the grains have burst and the pot is thick and glossy, 2 to 3 hours. 180 min
- Now beat it: press and drag the mass against the side of the pot until the chicken has gone to threads and a spoonful lifted out falls back as a sheet rather than in lumps.
- Brown the butter until it smells of hazelnuts, ladle the harisa into bowls, pull a well in each and pour the butter in. Pepper 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.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
Salted water & the float test 188 recipes
- The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
- There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
- Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
- Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
- Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.
Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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