Central Africa · Volume 09, Where Desert Meets Forest
Doulouf
Chad, and the Arab and Ouaddaï register
Illustration
- Time
- 2 hours
- Researched
- Researched from 142 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
Called doulouf, also kourakoura, and appearing on French menus as jarret de boeuf. Petit Futé confirms doulouf as beef shank in sauce, and my reading, stated as a reading, is that "jarret de boeuf" is the French rendering of the cut rather than a separate dish.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. At least 2 hours.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg beef shank, on the bone, cut across into thick rounds
- 3 tomatoes, chopped, or 2 tbsp tomato concentrate
- 2 onions, sliced
- 3 tbsp sesame oil, or din bagar, or clarified butter
- to taste ground coriander, dried chilli, black pepper, salt
- to barely cover water to barely cover
Method
- Brown the beef shank rounds in the sesame oil, din bagar or clarified butter, in batches, without crowding.
- Add the onions and cook until collapsed and beginning to colour.
- Add the tomatoes, ground coriander, dried chilli, black pepper and salt, and cook down until the mixture thickens and oil rises clear to the surface.
- Add the water to barely cover and braise at a bare simmer for at least 2 hours, until the meat yields and the marrow has gone.
- Reduce uncovered until the sauce is short, glossy and coats a spoon.
Notes
The two hours are not tradition for its own sake. They are what it takes to convert shank collagen to gelatin, and that gelatin is the body of a sauce with no thickener in it, which is why braising steak gives you a thin sauce and a dish that has lost its point.
What a modern chef changes
Mature meat, the fat split and re-married, a ferment instead of a cube
Rungs 5, 6 and 3
Method
- Use mutton or goat neck rather than lamb, or beef shank rather than beef anything else. These sauces are long-cooked and want mature meat and connective tissue. Lamb leg is lean, expensive and wrong.
- Split the sauce on purpose and rebuild it at the pass. Pour off the liquor, settle two minutes, spoon the fat into a warm jug, reduce the liquor hard, then whisk the fat back in off the heat to a glossy, just-split sauce. You choose when the emulsion breaks instead of letting two hours of simmering decide.
- Season with a fermented protein, not a bouillon cube, and finish with rob. Half a teaspoon of ground dawadawa in the last ten minutes, then a tablespoon of thick soured milk off the heat. Bouillon delivers salt and glutamate and nothing else; the ferment delivers a peptide load, and the soured milk rounds the reduction and adds the diacetyl note the dish is otherwise missing.