Pickle & Condiment Atlas · Sauce
Harissa
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, wood-smoke running underneath, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 80 g dried mild red chillies, guajillo or New Mexico, stemmed and seeded
- 20 g dried arbol chillies, stemmed
- 30 g garlic
- 8 g caraway seed
- 6 g coriander seed
- 4 g cumin seed
- 12 g fine sea salt
- 20 g red wine vinegar
- 120 g olive oil
Equipment
Blender · Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsSautéing & the shallow frySoaking dried goods back to lifeMashing & puréeing
The words inside
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
- Toast the chillies in a dry pan 30-45 seconds a side, pressing them flat, until they smell sweet and go flexible. Stop the instant any smoke smells acrid.
- Cover with hot water and soak 30 minutes until they are fully soft, then lift them out and squeeze; keep 50 g of the soaking water. 30 min
- Toast the caraway, coriander and cumin until fragrant and grind them with the salt.
- Pound the garlic to a paste, then work in the chillies and the soaking water, either in a mortar or a blender, to a thick puree.
- Beat in the spice and then the oil, a third at a time, then the vinegar. Jar it under a 5 mm slick of oil.
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.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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