Cooking Tharid for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Welcome to Grand Prix Gastronomy! This week, I’m cooking tharid, a lamb stew popular in Saudi Arabia.
This project is pretty simple. As a complement to each race weekend, I’ll be cooking the national dish of that race’s host country and sharing information about the process and that dish’s history along the way in an effort to grow more deeply immersed in the local culture from my own home.
What Is Tharid?
Saudi Arabia is another country that recognizes its own version of Bahrain’s machboos as its national dish, so when it came time to select a different recipe from the region, I was drawn to tharid — if only because multiple different sources wrote that it’s considered to be Prophet Muhammad’s favorite dish. If I was going to pick something, it might as well come highly recommended!
I’ve seen tharid described as both a bread soup and a meat stew, and I think both of those things are true. Essentially, the stew is served over thin pieces of unleavened bread that have, ideally, gone a little bit stale. That means the juices of the dish soak into the bread and give it a second life. You can also dip fresher bread into the stew, or layer up the stew with bread. I’m going to be serving my bread on the side.
If you don’t trace your heritage to the Arabian peninsula but recognize this dish as familiar, that’s because different versions of tharid are served around the world, in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. If you hail from one of those places, you’ll probably know the dish by a different name, like trid, terit, or fatteh.
This Week's Recipe
I poked through a lot of different tharid recipes, but I ultimately settled on this one from Saveur, largely because it came with a high rating and featured ingredients I knew I could source. I also try to find recipes that include a little blurb about the history of the recipe; it shows me that the author of the recipe was looking for a little authenticity, and that’s the whole goal of Grand Prix Gastronomy. There isn’t a link for bzar, the spice mix referenced in the recipe, but I also turned to Saveur for that. (You're not going to use all of the spice mix in this recipe, so package it up and save it for later. My delightful Jalopnik coworker Owen Bellwood told me that he used the machboos spice blend in a pumpkin soup to great effect; this spice blend is really similar, so I'm passing on this nugget of information to the rest of you!)
This is also the first of three dishes I’ll be cooking for this project that feature lamb, a meat that I’ve been notoriously iffy about. I’ve had some great lamb, and I’ve also had some lamb I simply did not enjoy. It’s not a meat I ever imagined myself cooking on my own, so I opted for a recipe that seemed approachable in other ways: mainly, with the abundance of tasty spices and the vegetables I already know and love.
Cooking Tharid
So, let's talk about preparing the lamb. I have never once cooked lamb in my life — but I have also never actually removed meat from a bone before cooking it, either. Preparing the lamb shoulder was a first for me in a lot of ways, and it was also the worst part of this cooking process. If you can get lamb shoulder at your butcher, ask them to chop it up into bits for you. I couldn't find lamb shoulder literally anywhere, so I had to order it off the internet, since it's the cut of lamb that every single lamb recipe in GPG uses. It was a slow, tedious, and vaguely gross process. Save yourself the hassle if you can.
Because the rest of this dish is actually really easy! There are a lot of veggies, but you pretty much just need to wash them and quarter them at the absolute most (with the exception of the onion; you do need to slice those into thin half-moons). You'll also need to prepare a spice blend, which I found is immensely easy when you actually have a spice grinder! All in all, the prep took me maybe 20 minutes, with the exception of the meat, which I challenged to single-handed combat for almost an hour. My kingdom for a butcher.
From there, the assembly of the dish is also really easy. You'll want to cover your meat with a generous coating of the bzar spice mix before you transfer it to a hot, well-oiled pan. Brown the meat on all sides, then remove it from the pan and cook down the onions, dried chilis, and cloves. Add in your spices and cook. Add in your tomatoes and let them really cook down. Then throw in the rest of the veggies and the meat before topping it up with liquid.
I say “liquid” because I did cheat here a little bit. The recipe calls for a whole lot of water, but I substituted it with a mix of roasted veggie and chicken broth. I'm sure the water is fine, especially because there are enough seasonings to pack a punch, but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it. Had I let the tharid simmer for longer, I'd have gone for water; with the barest amount of time to cook after the Day Job, I went for the quick hit of flavor. (If you do use the water, let me know how it goes!!)
The recipe also called for a lot of liquid, and when you serve tharid, you do often serve the meat and veggies on the flatbread with the liquid on the side. Again, I cheated a little, because I wanted to eat mine more like a stew, so I didn't add as much liquid as called for in the recipe. After letting it all simmer for two hours, I served up the tharid in a bowl and stuck a half-stale piece of naan into it, since that was the best flatbread offering I could find at the grocery store.
So, What's the Verdict?
I think that tharid was one of the dishes I was most concerned about, largely because I've never actually cooked with lamb before and had no idea what to expect. I was mostly worried that I'd go through this intensive cooking process only to find that, actually, I didn't like the flavor of the meat, and that would therefore spoil the whole dish for me. As I set out to cook, I was bolstered by two friends, one of whom assured me that most people consider lamb to be one of the best-tasting meats in the world and the other of whom told me it's a perfect meat for highly spiced dishes like the one I was making, and when you cook it low and slow, you're pretty much guaranteed a treat.
And I have to say, the result was phenomenal. Tharid is pretty spicy, so if you want a milder version, omit the dried chilis (or just add them in later in the simmering process for a gentler spice) and make sure your peppers are mild, too. It wasn't overpowering, though, which was great — you could still taste plenty of the cumin and coriander and other spices cooked up in this dish.
The lamb was also immense. I don't really know what I was expecting from it, but I really loved the fact that it stewed down into some fabulously tender, flavor-packed morsels that fell apart in my mouth. Lamb shoulder is one of those cuts that you do want to cook low and slow, but the results are perfect. I'm actually thinking about cooking the spiced lamb bites on their own, just because I think they'd be fantastic.
And if you've never had lamb before, don't worry about the flavor; some people call it game-y, but I didn't find this to be true. The lamb bites were highly spiced, so that did admittedly mask the flavor of the meat, but it reminded me quite a lot of pot roast in both texture and flavor.
Tharid is pretty much a complete meal in the sense that it provides a healthy serving of meat, veggies, and carbs, so all I needed to serve alongside it was some wine. I opted for a French grenache, which pairs really well with super flavorful, high-intensity meats and spices. It's an amazing wine with a lot of cooked fruitiness (think roasted strawberries and plums) with the leathery tannins of red wine punctuated by a citrusy zippiness. If your tharid is spicy, wine can get a little lost — but the grenache not only held up, it complemented.
I'm looking forward to making tharid again; it was a really great, comforting, and filling dish, and its spices helped kick a cold in the ass. I'd keep pretty much everything the same, but I do think I'd probably cut the veggies down smaller. I like my stews chunky, but those chunks need to be bite-sized!
Let's Chat!
You all blew me away with your amazing cooking skills!!! I was really hoping that folks would choose to cook along with this project, but for some reason, I thought it would take a few races before things really got going. Instead, y’all hit the kitchens with a passion! Please keep posting your photos and sharing them with me (and use the hashtag #GrandPrixGastronomy so I can make sure I see ‘em!).
Here are some of your fine, delicious-looking creations:
And I know there were more of you but I did a horrifying job saving your posts AND I WILL DO BETTER NEXT TIME.
If you have any questions about anything — me, the project, what have you — drop them in the comments or send me an email (elizablackstock@gmail.com). I'm here to chat!
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