North Africa · Volume 13, The Oldest Kitchen
Sayadeya
Alexandria and the coast
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The ratio is one onion per cup of rice, and the technique is a single decision that most cooks get wrong out of politeness. There is no other browning agent in the dish, so the onion supplies all the colour and, more importantly, a bitter savoury backbone that stands up to oily Mediterranean fish. Sweet caramelised onion would make the whole thing cloying with mullet or sea bass. Siwa arrives at the same idea independently in sekouti, rice cooked with burnt onion juice, hundreds of kilometres from any sea.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
An outline, not yet a recipe: the tradition's method with its ingredients named but not weighed. Quantities are being added from sources inside the tradition, lead dishes first.
- 2 medium onions, sliced
- 2 cups Egyptian short or medium grain rice
- 3 tbsp neutral oil
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 475 to 700 ml water or seafood stock
- white fish: sea bass, mullet or bream
- 1 tsp salt, and tomato paste if you want it
Method
- Cook the medium onions in the neutral oil over medium high heat for about 23 minutes, stirring often, until they develop burnt bits on the edges. Not golden. Not sweetly caramelised. Scorched.
- Toast the ground cumin 3 minutes, then the Egyptian short or medium grain rice 5 minutes.
- Add the water or seafood stock and salt, with tomato paste if you want it, bring up, and simmer covered 20 minutes.
- Rest 10 minutes off the heat before opening.
- Cook the white fish, such as sea bass, mullet or bream, separately and serve it over the rice.
Notes
After Am What I Eat.
What a modern chef changes
The scorch measured, the stock made from the fish you are serving, and the bitterness aimed at something
Rungs 3 and 1
Method
- Take the onions to scorch in two stages and stop on a colour. Rung 3's hard stop applied at the other end of the browning curve. Sweat them covered for 10 minutes first to release their water, then uncover and drive them hard. You get genuinely blackened edges over a deep brown body rather than a pan of unevenly burnt sugar. Taste a piece: you want bitter over sweet, and you want to be slightly nervous.
- Make a stock from the fish you are cooking. Rung 1. Heads, frames and skin, 30 minutes at a bare simmer, strained. Fish stock goes bitter and glue-like if you push it, so keep it short. This is a two ingredient dish plus rice, and the stock is one of the two.
- Aim the bitterness. Time Out describes Meedu Saad as deploying bitterness against umami, which is precisely what scorched onion is for. Serve this with an oily fish; a delicate fillet of cod is simply outgunned.
- Rest, and do not stir. The 10 minute rest is when the surface starch on the short grain finishes setting and the grain becomes distinct. Stirring in that window turns sayadeya into risotto.