Harees

Ingredients

• Whole wheat — soaked overnight400 g
• Lamb on the bone900 g
• Cinnamon stick1
• Cardamom pods4
• Ghee100 g
• Onion — to serve1
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Soak the wheat overnight in cold water and rinse it.

   10 min

2. 2

   Cover the meat with three litres of water, bring it up and skim.

   20 min

3. 3

   Add the wheat, cinnamon and cardamom and simmer two hours.

   125 min

4. 4

   Remove the bones and whole spices, season, and cook an hour more, stirring and topping up with boiling water.

   65 min

5. 5

   Beat the mass with a wooden spoon or a mixer until entirely smooth — twenty minutes of work.

   22 min

6. 6

   Spread it in a dish, make a hollow, pour in melted ghee and scatter with fried onion.

   10 min

About the dish

Harees simmers for three hours or more and is then beaten completely smooth. Neither grain nor meat fibre should be distinguishable — that is the test of doneness rather than a matter of taste.

There is almost no spice in it: salt, a little cinnamon, sometimes cardamom. The flavour comes from the meat itself and the ghee on top, and adding more counts as spoiling it.

It is a breaking-fast dish: after a day without food harees sits easier than rice and meat, and in Ramadan it comes first after the dates.

Worth knowing

• — Use a heavy-based pan and stir often. Harees catches instantly, and the burnt smell runs through the whole mass.
• — A stick blender is easier, but traditionally it is beaten by hand with a wooden paddle called a midhra.
• — The ghee on top is not decoration: without it harees is bland, and in the Gulf it is poured generously.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

600 kcal

Protein

38 g

Fat

28 g

Carbs

52 g

More from Kuwait

• Murabyan — Kuwaiti rice with prawns in a broth of their own shells, with dill and dried lime.