The Indian subcontinent · Volume 16, The Ember Pit, the Merchant’s Table and a Desert That Wastes Nothing
Jungli maas
Rajput hunting camps, Rajasthan
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- Researched from 17 sources in the brief
The hunter's own version, and the clearest possible contrast to laal maas's careful onion-browning and layered spicing. Chef Akshraj Jodha's own account of the dish, reported by Scroll.in, gives it as almost nothing: mutton, ghee, salt and dried red chillies, mixed together and cooked slow and covered, with no water added at all, the meat cooking through entirely in its own released juices. Forbes India distinguishes it from laal maas in exactly these terms, calling it "a minimal masala version with ghee and whole chillies" against laal maas's ginger-spiced, onion-intensive build. This is field food: the ingredients a mounted hunting party could plausibly have carried and cooked with no pantry to draw on beyond what sat in a saddlebag.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 700 g mutton or goat, cut into chunks
- 4 tbsp ghee
- 8 to 10 whole dried red chillies
- to taste salt
Method
- Cut the mutton or goat into chunks.
- Combine in a heavy, well-lidded pot with the ghee, whole dried red chillies and salt. No onion, no ginger, no garlic, no liquid.
- Set over the lowest possible heat, cover tightly, and cook undisturbed for around an hour and a half, until the meat has released its own juices, cooked through in them, and the fat has separated visibly at the surface.
- Resist the urge to add water; the dish's whole logic depends on the meat cooking in nothing but its own moisture and the ghee.
What a modern chef changes
A held, even heat for the hunter's one-pot, and a clarified finish
Rungs 1 and 2
Method
- Hold a guaranteed even heat. Use the sous vide to guarantee the low, even heat a wood fire's uneven embers could only approximate, holding the meat at 68°C for four hours before a final ten minutes in the pot to pick up the chilli and ghee.
- Toast the chillies dry first. Toast the whole dried chillies briefly in the dry pot before the ghee goes in, a small addition with no traditional precedent, but one that deepens the chilli's own flavour before it ever touches fat, consistent with the dish's minimal-ingredient spirit rather than against it.
- Clarify the fat. Pass the rendered fat through a chinois at the end and spoon it back over the meat as a glossy finish, rather than serving the dish as it emerges from the pot.
- Serve with a single grilled chilli. Unstuffed, unadorned, so the dish's whole point, that heat and fat and patience are enough, is stated rather than gestured at.