Yemeni & the Gulf · Sauce
Sahawiq Hamra
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with a warm current of chile, aromatics blooming from the first bite, settling low and earthy.
Ingredients
- 25 g dried red chillies, stems removed
- 4 garlic cloves
- 1 tsp cumin seed
- half tsp coriander seed
- 1 tsp salt
- 250 g ripe tomatoes
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
Equipment
Mortar & pestle · Grater / zester
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
- Cover the dried chillies with just boiled water and leave them until they are limp and the water has stained deep red, about 20 minutes; drain, keeping one spoonful of the soaking water. 20 min
- Pound the garlic, salt, cumin and coriander in a mortar until the garlic no longer shows as white flecks and the paste is wet and smooth.
- Tear in the drained chillies and pound until the skins break down and the paste turns glossy brick red, adding the reserved water only if the pestle starts to drag.
- Halve the tomatoes and grate them down to the skin on the coarse side of a box grater, discarding the skins.
- Beat the pulp into the chilli paste a spoonful at a time so it stays thick and clinging, then sharpen with the lemon juice and more salt.
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.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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