Senegalese · Main
Thiébou Yapp
- Advanced
- 55 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 900 g lamb shoulder on the bone, in 5 cm pieces
- 500 g broken rice (riz brisé)
- 700 g onions, half sliced thin, half chopped
- 120 ml groundnut oil
- 70 g double concentrate tomato paste
- 1 tbsp netetou (fermented locust bean), crushed
- 1 whole scotch bonnet, left unbroken
- 1 head garlic, cloves peeled
- 25 g flat parsley
- 1 tbsp black peppercorns
- 300 g cassava, peeled, in thick batons
- 400 g green cabbage, in wedges through the core
- 2 carrots (200 g), halved lengthways
- 3 jaxatu (bitter garden eggs), pierced
- 1.6 litres water
- salt
The skills inside
FermentationFrying the paste until the oil splitsSteaming: basket, leaf and lidKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: egg · peanuts
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
- Pound peppercorns, garlic, netetou, parsley and the chopped onion to a coarse wet nokoss; work half of it into slits cut in the lamb.
- Brown the lamb in the oil in a wide pot, turning only when each face releases itself and the pot smells toasted rather than steamy.
- Add the sliced onion and the rest of the nokoss, then the tomato paste, and fry until the paste darkens from red to brick and oil beads out around it.
- Pour in the water, drop in the whole chilli and the vegetables, and simmer until cassava gives to a knife with no resistance at the centre; lift out meat, chilli and vegetables and cover them.
- Taste the broth: it should be a shade too strong and leave a film on the spoon. Reduce if it is thin, then stir in the rinsed broken rice.
- Cook uncovered until the liquid drops to the level of the grains, then cover, drop the heat to the barest thread and steam until the surface is pitted with holes and a grain squashes clean. Pile the rice, crown with meat and vegetables.
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.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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