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Mansaf

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70 min
roughly 3 of 4 for cost

warm-spiced · rich · nutty-toasted · herb-fresh Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, richness that coats and comforts, lifted green at the very end.

Ingredients

1.6 kg lamb shoulder on the bone, in 8 pieces
400 g jameed (dried fermented sheep's yoghurt), broken up
1.5 litres cold water, for soaking the jameed
1 onion, halved
1 short cinnamon stick
4 green cardamom pods, cracked
60 g ghee
400 g long-grain rice, rinsed until the water runs clear
2 g ground turmeric
3 g black pepper, ground
5 g fine salt
2 shrak or markook flatbreads
80 g blanched almonds
50 g pine nuts
15 g flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Equipment

Sheet pan

The skills inside

Fermentation The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil Blanching & shocking Straining & passing through a sieve

Allergen screen

Found: dairy · 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

Cover the jameed with the cold water and leave it in the fridge overnight, until it gives like wet clay; blend it and pass it through a sieve to a thin, pourable, chalk-white liquid.
Cover the lamb with cold water, bring it to a bare tremble and skim until the surface stays clear, then add the onion, cinnamon and cardamom and hold it just under a simmer for about 2 hours, until a piece drops off the bone under its own weight. 120 min
Lift out the lamb and strain the broth; cook the rice in 700 ml of that broth with 20 g of the ghee and the turmeric, lid on, until the grains stand separate and the pan smells toasted.
Pour the jameed into a wide pan and bring it up over low heat, stirring in one direction and never stopping, until it thickens a little and the raw chalk smell goes; slide in the lamb with the pepper, hold it there for 20 minutes, then taste and stir in the salt only if it needs it. 20 min
Fry the almonds and pine nuts in the rest of the ghee to the colour of straw; lay the bread on a wide tray and ladle over enough hot jameed to soak it soft, then spread the rice, set the lamb on top, pour over the rest of the sauce and scatter the nuts and parsley.

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.

Fermentation 53 recipes

Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.

Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.

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.

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

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Mansaf Technique: FermentationThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Levantine kitchen