Iraqi · Main
Tepsi Baytinijan
- Intermediate
- 50 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 3 large aubergines, about 1 kg, sliced 1 cm thick
- 500 g minced lamb
- 1 onion, grated and squeezed dry
- 20 g flat leaf parsley, chopped
- 2 tsp baharat
- 3 potatoes, sliced 5 mm thick
- 4 tomatoes, sliced
- 2 onions, sliced into rings
- 4 cloves garlic, sliced
- 40 g tomato paste
- 20 g tamarind paste
- 400 ml water
- 2 tsp salt
- sunflower oil for frying
Equipment
Sheet pan · Deep-fry pot · 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
- Salt the aubergine slices and leave them 20 minutes until beads of water stand on the cut faces, then blot both sides completely dry. 20 min
- Fry them in oil held at 180C (350F), in batches that do not crowd, until deep gold and slack, lifting each slice as soon as the hissing drops off, and drain on paper.
- Work the lamb with the grated onion, parsley, baharat and salt until it turns tacky and clings to the bowl, flatten it into discs the width of the aubergine slices and brown them on both sides.
- Colour the potato slices in the same oil, then build the tray: aubergine first, then the kufta discs, potato, tomato, onion rings and garlic.
- Whisk the tomato paste and tamarind into the water with a pinch of salt, pour it down the side of the tray and bake at 190C (375F) until the top slices are blistered and the liquid has drawn down to a glaze, about 45 minutes. 45 min
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.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
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.
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