North Africa · Volume 14, The Tagine and the Preserve
Kefta mkaouara
National, everyday
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 101 sources in the brief
Eaten straight from the vessel with bread and no cutlery. It is here because it is the clearest demonstration of the post-Columbian layer: 900 g of tomato per 450 g of meat, plus paprika, in a cuisine whose oldest recorded dishes contain neither. Roll the meatballs very small, the size of cherries. That is the instruction every British version ignores, and it changes the dish: small balls give far more surface for the sauce and cook through in ten minutes without drying.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
- 450 g minced beef or lamb, or both
- 1 small onion, grated
- 3 tbsp each chopped parsley and coriander
- 1 tsp each sweet paprika, ground cumin and salt
- ¼ tsp black pepper, plus optional ¼ tsp each turmeric and cinnamon
- 900 g ripe tomatoes
- 60 ml oil
- 1 medium onion, 1 small green pepper, 4 garlic cloves
- 1.5 tsp each sweet paprika, cumin and salt, and ¼ tsp black pepper
- 1 bay leaf, and 2 tbsp each parsley and coriander
- 4 eggs
Method
- Mix the minced beef or lamb with the onion, parsley, coriander, paprika, cumin, salt, black pepper and, if using, the turmeric and cinnamon to make the kefta, then roll it into very small balls.
- Cook the oil, onion, green pepper, garlic, paprika, cumin, salt, black pepper and bay leaf down 15 to 30 minutes, crush in the tomatoes, parsley and coriander, then reduce a further 15 to 30 minutes.
- Add the meatballs and simmer 10 to 15 minutes.
- Crack the eggs in last and cook only until the whites firm and the yolks begin to set.
What a modern chef changes
The tomato reduced properly, the meatballs browned, the eggs treated as a separate cook
Rungs 3, 2 and 6
Method
- Reduce the tomato until it breaks. The recipe's 30 to 60 minutes is a minimum, and the endpoint is daghmira's: the sauce is done when oil stands clear at the edges. Rung 3's principle applied to fruit pectin rather than onion pectin.
- Brown the meatballs separately, then finish them in the sauce. Rung 2. Hot pan, 90 seconds, rolled once, then into the sauce for the last 10 minutes. You gain the melanoidins and lose nothing.
- Cook the eggs off the heat. Pan off, make wells, crack in, cover, let residual heat set the whites over 4 to 5 minutes. The yolks stay liquid and become a sauce component, and there is a texture contrast on a plate that otherwise has none. Rung 6.