Iraqi · Starter

Kubba Halab

Advanced
60 min
roughly 3 of 4 for cost

warm-spiced · earthy · sweet-edged · herb-fresh Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, an earthy, grounding base, lifted green at the very end.

Ingredients

400 g short grain rice
2 tsp ground turmeric
40 g cornflour
300 g minced lamb
2 onions, finely chopped
60 g blanched almonds, chopped
40 g raisins
20 g flat leaf parsley, chopped
2 tsp baharat
1 tsp ground cinnamon
60 ml sunflower oil, plus 1.5 litres for frying
3 tsp salt

The skills inside

Sweating aromatics: soft, never browned Blanching & shocking Shaping by hand

Allergen screen

Found: nuts

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

Boil the rice hard with the turmeric and a teaspoon of salt in plenty of water until the grains are soft well past pleasant eating and beginning to break apart, then drain.
Pound or blitz the rice while it is still hot with the cornflour until it becomes a smooth yellow paste that leaves the side of the bowl in one mass, then cover it and keep it warm.
Soften the onion in the 60 ml oil, add the lamb, baharat, cinnamon and remaining salt and cook until no pink shows and the pan runs dry, then fold through the almonds, raisins and parsley and cool the filling completely.
With wet hands, hollow a golf ball of paste into a cup, load a spoonful of cold filling, close the seam and roll it between your palms into a torpedo until the surface is unbroken and glossy.
Fry a few at a time at 175C (350F), turning, until the shells are deep amber and sound hard to a tap, then drain them standing on end.

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.

Blanching & shocking 76 recipes

A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.

Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.

Shaping by hand 85 recipes

The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.

Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.

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.

Family notes

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Kubba Halab The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Iraqi kitchen