Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 07, The Reef, the Earth Oven and the Girmit Table
Goat Palau
Indo-Fijian
Illustration
- Time
- 3 hours 30
- Researched
- 9 sources cited
Bone-in goat, browned in ghee with whole spice, built into a long, slow curry, then layered with toasted basmati and cooked through together until the rice takes on the meat's own flavour. This dish and its recipe come directly from Fuzz Ali, a Sydney-based Indo-Fijian, Indigenous Fijian and wider Pacific-heritage food writer and broadcaster, and is used here with that attribution.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 3.5 hours.
Ingredients
- 1 kg bone-in goat, cut into pieces
- 4 tbsp ghee
- 2 sticks, 4 whole, 1 sprig cinnamon stick, star anise, curry leaves
- 2 onions, thinly sliced
- 400 g tin whole peeled tomatoes
- 1½ thumbs, ½ cup, 7 crushed ginger, garlic, bird's eye chilli, to taste
- all of it, plus 1½ tbsp palau masala (below), plus garam masala
- to taste, to taste salt, a little sugar
- 2 cups basmati rice
- a handful fresh coriander, to finish
Palau masala
- 2 sticks cinnamon stick
- 1 tsp cloves
- 1 tbsp fennel seed
- 1 tbsp cumin seed
- 1 tsp coriander seed
- 1 heaped tbsp, broken star anise
- 1 tsp cardamom pods
For the chutney
- 2 tins canned tomato
- 2 onion
- ¼ cup garlic
- 3 chilli
- 4 tbsp ghee
- 1 tsp mustard seed
- ½ tsp fenugreek seed
- a handful coriander, to finish
Method
- Brown the goat in the ghee with whole cinnamon, star anise and curry leaves.
- Add the onions, caramelising them to deep golden.
- Add the tomatoes, ginger, garlic, chilli, palau masala, garam masala, salt and a little sugar.
- Cover and cook on low heat for approximately 2.5 hours, until the goat is very tender.
- Separately, toast the basmati in ghee with curry leaves, cumin and fennel seed.
- Combine the goat and rice in layers, cover tightly, cook with periodic stirring until steam builds, then rest covered for 15 minutes.
- Finish with fresh coriander and serve with the tomato chutney.
Notes
Palau masala: toast and grind together cinnamon stick, cloves, fennel seed, cumin seed, coriander seed, star anise and cardamom pods.
For the chutney: canned tomato, onion, garlic, chilli and ghee, with mustard and fenugreek seed, finished with coriander.
What a modern chef changes
The long braise moved to a controlled bath, and the caramelised onion given the time it actually needs rather than the time a stovetop usually allows
Rung 4
Method
- Braise the browned goat sous vide at 85°C for 10 to 12 hours, sealed with the aromatics and tomato base, for an evenly, deeply broken-down texture without any risk of catching on the base of the pot over an unattended 2.5-hour stovetop simmer.
- Caramelise the onions properly, low and slow for 45 minutes to an hour, well beyond what feels necessary, before the garlic and spice go in, since the deep gold colour recipe writers repeatedly name as the marker of a "proper" curry base is doing real flavour work through sustained Maillard browning, not simply softening the onion.
- Finish the rice separately and fold the braised goat through just before the final steam-and-rest step, rather than cooking rice and meat together from raw, for more distinct, better-textured grains than a combined cook reliably gives.