The Horn · Volume 12, The Nile Foodways
Mullah rob
Sudan
Illustration
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 124 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
Rob means soured milk, and Sudanese rob is churned buttermilk, not set yoghurt, so it is lower in solids, thinner, and more inclined to break. Both published versions of this dish stabilise it, and neither says so.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp oil
- 2 onions, chopped
- 3 garlic cloves
- 450 g minced lamb
- 480 ml water
- 2 tbsp plain flour
- 2 to 3 tbsp lamb bouillon
- 2 tbsp unsweetened peanut butter
- 2 tbsp tomato concentrate
- 240 ml yoghurt, or rob
Method
- Sauté the onions and garlic cloves in the oil, add the minced lamb and brown it.
- Add the water and simmer 10 minutes.
- Whisk in the plain flour and the lamb bouillon.
- Add the unsweetened peanut butter, the tomato concentrate and the yoghurt, and cook 5 minutes more.
Notes
The published version from Far Afield (Shane Mitchell, Ten Speed Press, 2016), given because it carries weights.
A diaspora home version runs richer and looser: 500 g minced beef, four onions, 1.5 cups of oil, 2 cups of yoghurt, peanut, tomato paste, six crushed garlic cloves, cumin, coriander, paprika and dried okra powder. Two cups of yoghurt to 500 g of mince is a very high dairy load, and it works because the solids themselves do the stabilising.
What a modern chef changes
Culture your own rob, add it off the heat, and understand what the flour was always for
Rungs 6, 3 and 1
Method
- Culture a rob and keep it going. Whole milk soured overnight with a spoon of the last batch, held at a fixed temperature, is a perpetual culture on a feed schedule: the siin bag on the camel, minus the camel. Churn a batch occasionally and you get the butter, which is the product, and the buttermilk, which is what the dish actually wants.
- Add it off the heat, below about 80°C. Diacetyl reads as buttery and acetaldehyde as fresh, and both are volatile and gone in a boiling pot; casein at low pH curdles into grains under a simmer.
- Understand the flour and dose it deliberately. Two tablespoons of plain flour in one version, and very high-solids yoghurt in the other, are doing the same job: keeping the casein network from aggregating. Thin rob needs the starch. Measure it, and stop pretending it is a thickener.
- Replace the bouillon with the mullah base, Rung 3, because two to three tablespoons of stock powder is exactly the substitution this chapter is arguing you out of.