Grill & BBQ Atlas · Main
Nyama Choma
- Easy
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with char used as punctuation, acid holding everything up to the light, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg goat leg or shoulder in large bone-in pieces (or beef short ribs, but goat is the word's meaning in practice)
- Salt, the traditional seasoning in full; a baste of salt water is the old way
- The modern option: a light rub of garlic, ginger, lemon and a little oil (purists abstain and are correct to)
- Kachumbari (the East African shelf holds it) and ugali, the holy trinity of the choma joint
- Steady charcoal, a grill grate, and no hurry whatsoever: choma is an afternoon, not a meal
Equipment
Grill
The skills 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
- Salt the meat; let it stand while the coals burn to steady gray.
- Grill over MEDIUM coals, turning every 10 min and basting with salt water, 45–75 min depending on the cut; nyama choma is cooked past medium on purpose: firm, chewy at the edges, deeply browned; this is the texture the tradition wants, not a failure of it. 10 min
- Rest briefly; chop through the bone into chunks on a board. The board often comes to the table as the platter.
- Serve with kachumbari heaped alongside, ugali for the hands, and more salt on the board. Eat with fingers, unhurried, over hours.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
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
- Zinfandel (old-vine)
- Also Right
- Shiraz or Malbec
- From the Taps
- Smoked porter
- Zero-Proof
- Cherry cola, honestly
Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.
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