Jareesh

crushed wheat cooked slowly with meat and soured milk into a coarse savoury porridge, finished with browned onion

Origin: Riyadh & the Najd, Saudi Arabia

From the journey of Wheat.

Jareesh is crushed wheat, and the word names both the grain and the dish. It belongs to the Najd, the central plateau of Saudi Arabia around Riyadh, where it is the everyday winter food and a fixture of weddings and gatherings, cooked in quantity and served from a communal dish. It is close kin to harees and Saudis distinguish them firmly. Harees uses whole wheat berries beaten with meat until the two become a single smooth, almost glutinous paste. Jareesh uses wheat cracked coarsely before cooking and is never beaten to smoothness: the grain stays visible and the texture is deliberately coarse. Jareesh also carries soured milk or yoghurt, which harees does not, and that acidity is the second thing that separates them. The finish is a heavy spoonful of onion cooked slowly to a deep brown in ghee, poured over the top with the fat, sometimes with tomato worked through it. In many Najdi households a little of that browned onion mixture is stirred back in and the rest left in a pool on the surface. Wheat has grown in the oases of the Najd and Al-Ahsa for millennia, and cracked-grain porridges are among the oldest recorded ways of eating it anywhere. What keeps jareesh in daily use rather than in the museum is that it is genuinely good: soured, savoury, and substantial in a way rice is not.

Ingredients

  • 400 g coarsely crushed wheat (jareesh), rinsed and soaked 1 hour
  • 700 g lamb or chicken on the bone
  • 2 onions, one quartered and two finely sliced
  • 300 ml laban or plain yoghurt, whisked smooth
  • 80 g ghee
  • 2 tomatoes, chopped
  • 1 tbsp baharat
  • 2 dried limes (loomi), pierced
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 2 litres water

Method

  1. Simmer the meat with the quartered onion, the cinnamon stick, one dried lime, half the baharat, and the water for fifty minutes, skimming the surface. Lift out the meat, strip it from the bone, and keep the stock.
  2. Drain the soaked jareesh and add it to the stock with the salt and the second lime. Bring to a simmer.
  3. Cook uncovered for an hour to an hour and a quarter, stirring every ten minutes and topping up with hot water as it thickens. The grain should soften and swell but stay visible; this is not a dish beaten smooth.
  4. Pull the dried limes out once the pot tastes gently sour.
  5. Return the meat, then stir in the yoghurt off the heat or over the barest flame, a little at a time. Added to a boiling pot it will split.
  6. Cook very gently for a further ten minutes so the acidity settles into the grain. Taste for salt.
  7. Meanwhile fry the sliced onions in the ghee over a low heat for twenty minutes until deep brown and sweet, then add the tomatoes and remaining baharat and cook for five minutes more.
  8. Turn the jareesh into a wide dish, make a hollow in the middle, and pour the onion mixture and its ghee into it. Serve from the centre outwards.

Notes

Coarse crushed wheat, not bulgur and not whole berries; jareesh is sold as such in Gulf and Middle Eastern shops. Keep the texture coarse, since beating it smooth turns it into harees, which is a different dish. The yoghurt goes in off the heat. If the pot stiffens too much on standing, loosen it with hot stock rather than water.

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