Table for TwoMansaf
Jordan's national dish: tender lamb cooked in tangy fermented-yogurt sauce, served over rice with toasted almonds and pine nuts.
Photo: Jktab / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
⏱ 150 min📶 Hard👫 Serves 2☪ Muslim-friendly
Ingredients (for 2)
- Lamb shoulder on the bone, 700 g
- Jameed (dried yogurt), 200 g, or thick Greek yogurt with 1 tbsp cornflour
- Rice, 1½ cups
- Onion, 1
- Cardamom pods & bay leaves, a few
- Ghee, 3 tbsp
- Turmeric, ½ tsp
- Toasted almonds & pine nuts, 4 tbsp
- Thin flatbread (shrak), to line the platter
- Fresh parsley, to serve
Steps
- Simmer the lamb with the onion, cardamom and bay leaves for about 1½ hours until tender, skimming the foam.
- Soak jameed in warm water and blend smooth (or whisk the yogurt with cornflour), then gently heat with some of the lamb broth, stirring constantly so it does not split.
- Move the lamb into the yogurt sauce and simmer for 15 minutes.
- Cook the rice with the ghee, turmeric and salt.
- Line a big tray with flatbread, pile on the rice and lamb, spoon over sauce and scatter with nuts and parsley.
Cook it together: Mansaf is a sharing dish — one stirs the yogurt sauce (constantly!), the other toasts the nuts and builds the platter.
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