East African · Main
Mbuzi wa Kupaka
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, acid holding everything up to the light, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg goat leg or shoulder on the bone, in serving pieces
- 12 g fine salt
- 6 garlic cloves
- 30 g ginger
- 2 red chillies
- 1 onion, grated
- 5 g ground turmeric
- 5 g ground cumin
- 5 g ground coriander
- 3 g black pepper, ground
- 30 ml vegetable oil
- 400 ml thick coconut milk
- 40 g tamarind pulp, soaked in 80 ml hot water and strained
- 1 lime, juiced
Equipment
Grill · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Grilling over live coalsFrying the paste until the oil splitsSalted water & the float testStraining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquidThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
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
- Simmer the goat in salted water with half the garlic and ginger for about 1 hour 15 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance, and keep back 200 ml of the liquor. 60 min
- Blend the rest of the garlic and ginger with the chillies and onion, then fry the paste in the oil with the turmeric, cumin, coriander and pepper until it darkens and loses its raw smell.
- Pour in the coconut milk, tamarind water and reserved liquor and reduce over low heat, stirring, until it holds a line drawn across the pan with a spoon; never let it boil hard.
- Pour a third of the sauce into a jug for the table before any brush touches it, and keep the rest as the basting sauce. Grill the goat over charcoal or under a hot grill, brushing on thin coats from the basting bowl and turning between them, until the outside is lacquered dark red in patches.
- Squeeze over the lime and serve with the sauce from the jug. Anything left in the basting bowl has been on a brush that touched part-cooked meat, so boil it for a full minute before it goes to the table, or throw it out.
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.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Champagne: when lost, bubbles
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais, lightly chilled
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
The universal donors: acid, bubbles, and low tannin rescue nearly any plate: the sommelier’s honest safety net.
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