The Horn · Volume 11, The Indian Ocean Kitchen

Suqaar

Name: Suqaar
Total time: 25 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Somalia & Djibouti
Ingredients: 2 tbsp neutral oil; 700 g beef chuck, in small even dice; 1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped; 2 large carrots, sliced thin; 1 tbsp ground cumin; 1 tbsp ground turmeric; 60 ml water; 1 small green pepper, sliced thin; 2 tbsp lime juice; to taste coriander leaf, salt

Somalia and the diaspora

Suqaar: Small even cubes of beef, browned dark at their edges and stained gold with turmeric, tossed with thin carrot slices, coarse chopped onion and strips of green pepper. Dry rather than saucy.

Illustration

Time: 25 minutes

Researched: Researched from 103 sources in the brief
Reviewed: Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
Cooked: Awaiting a cook report

Suqaar is a knife dish: small, uniform dice of beef, lamb, goat, camel or chicken, cooked fast with onion, carrot and pepper. It cooks in ten minutes, which is why it is the everyday dish and why 70 per cent of surveyed households eat their canjeero with it. It lives or dies on uniform dice and a genuinely hot pan, and no amount of spice fixes an uneven cut.

As tradition built it

Serves 4. 25 minutes.

Ingredients

2 tbsp neutral oil
700 g beef chuck, in small even dice
1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped
2 large carrots, sliced thin
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground turmeric
60 ml water
1 small green pepper, sliced thin
2 tbsp lime juice
to taste coriander leaf, salt

Method

The beef chuck and large yellow onion into the hot neutral oil over medium-high. Brown 10 minutes. Do not crowd the pan; if it steams, the dish is already lost.
Add the large carrots, ground cumin, ground turmeric and salt with the water. Cover 5 minutes.
Add the small green pepper. Cover 5 minutes more.
Off the heat, then the lime juice and the coriander leaf. Not before.

Notes

After Hawa Hassan, In Bibi's Kitchen.

What a modern chef changes

A better dice, a real fond, and the acid at the last possible second

Rungs 3 and 6

Method

Dice to 1 cm and mean it. Chill the beef 20 minutes first so it firms and cuts cleanly. Uniform dice means every piece hits temperature at the same moment, which is the entire proposition of the dish.
Brown in two batches and deglaze between them, then the onion into the fond and a splash of the reduced braise liquid from Rung 4 rather than water. Ten minutes of browning in an overloaded pan is ten minutes of steaming.
Sequence the spice. Bloom the cumin in the fat with the onion and hold the turmeric back to the covered phase: turmeric browns and bitters in a hot dry pan, and cumin does not. Rung 3 at its simplest.
Acid and herb into the bowl at the pass, less than a minute before service. Rung 6. Coriander aldehydes are gone within minutes of heat.

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