The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 04, The Jameed, the Taboon and the Zarb Pit

Musakhan

Tulkarm and Jenin, northern West Bank

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 1 hour

Researched: Researched from 121 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Sumac, caramelised onion and taboon bread over roast chicken, traditionally made in October and November to celebrate the olive harvest and taste the season's new oil.

by Tulkarm and Jenin, northern West Bank

Carol Palmer's 2002 ethnographic fieldwork across northern and southern Jordan, published in the journal Levant, found something this chapter treats as its real starting point: settled farmers, semi-nomadic farmers and goat-herding Bedouin across the same territory used overlapping raw ingredients, wheat and milk chief among them, but diverged sharply in how they prepared and stored them, and that divergence was not incidental. It actively marked who was who. A Bedouin household turned its milk into jameed because a herding economy that moves with the seasons cannot keep fresh dairy; a fellahin household turned its wheat into taboon bread and its olives into oil because a settled, terraced hillside economy could. This chapter's whole spine, mansaf and zarb on one side, musakhan, maqluba and knafeh on the other, is this same ecological and economic split, not a difference of national character.

Read the history

As tradition built it

A whole 1.7kg chicken; about 1 hour.

Ingredients

1.7kg whole chicken, quartered
2 tbsp olive oil, for the chicken
1 tbsp ground cumin
3 tbsp sumac, plus extra to finish
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice
500g large red onions (about 3), sliced 2 to 3mm thick
90ml (6 tbsp) olive oil, for cooking the onions
to taste salt
30g pine nuts
330g taboon breads or flatbreads (about 4)
5g parsley, chopped
to serve yoghurt and lemon, to serve

Method

Quarter the whole chicken, 1.7kg, coat it in two tablespoons of olive oil and part of a spice mix of one tablespoon ground cumin, three tablespoons sumac, and half a teaspoon each cinnamon and allspice, then roast at 200°C fan for forty five minutes.
Cook the sliced red onions, 500g, in the remaining oil with salt for fifteen minutes on medium heat until soft and pale gold, then stir through the rest of the spice mix.
Toast thirty grams of pine nuts for two to three minutes.
Toast the taboon breads or flatbreads, 330g, under the grill for two to three minutes.
Layer the bread with onions, chicken, more onions, the toasted pine nuts, five grams of chopped parsley, extra sumac and a final drizzle of oil, and serve with yoghurt and lemon.

Notes

This recipe, published in Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley's Falastin, is a genuine in-tradition source: Tamimi was born and raised in East Jerusalem. Musakhan was traditionally made in October and November, the olive harvest, both to celebrate it and to taste the season's new oil.

What a modern chef changes

The chicken cooked in two deliberate stages, and the taboon crust rebuilt on ceramic-retained heat

Rung 3

Method

Cook the chicken sous vide first at a precise low temperature that renders it fully, evenly tender, then finish it hard and fast under the Big Green Egg's direct heat purely for colour and skin texture, a two-stage version of a job the tradition already does in one, less controllable roast.
Caramelise the onions far more slowly than the fifteen minutes tradition allows, an hour or more at a genuinely low, patient heat, for a deeper, sweeter result, the same technique simply taken further rather than changed.
Bake the taboon bread on a Big Green Egg loaded with a pizza stone or unglazed quarry tiles at its full ceramic-retained heat, dimpling the dough by hand first, for a closer approximation of a real stone-fired taboon crust than a domestic grill ever produces. Rung 3.

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