Harissa.
The pleasantly oily chilli paste with a hint of spice who can name yogurt, lamb and fresh mint among it's favourite playmates. Plus, a simple recipe for Beef & Harissa Stew.
Welcome to ingredient, where once a month I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. This month I’m focusing on Harissa: the North African chilli paste that can be considered both fiery and mellow depending on how you choose to cook with it.
We’re changing things up a bit here at ingredient, and whilst I’ll still be sharing three brand new and exclusive recipes every month (and one of them will now be available to all subscribers) featuring each month’s ingredient, instead of sharing them all on the same day in one post, I’ve included my recipe for Beef & Harissa Stew at the bottom of this post, and two more harissa-celebrating recipes will be with you later in the month. I’m excited to experiment with this, it means you’ll be hearing from me a bit more and I think it will make my recipes easier to access and search, but, also, I think it will also help make my recipe development workload a bit more manageable each month! Things have been a little crazy recently!
To receive these recipes, plus access all of the recipes from past newsletters as well as my monthly Kitchen Cupboards interviews (and this months I think is going to be our most exciting yet!), you can upgrade your subscription here. And if you fancy exploring the archives for more inspiration, last April we were all about Matzo Meal.
Harissa, the pleasantly oily North African chilli paste that can yield results anywhere on the spectrum from mild to fiery depending on your choice of brand and application came to my kitchen relatively late.
Made from a blend of roasted chilli peppers, garlic, coriander seeds, cumin, and often caraway suspended in a slick of oil somewhere halfway between a chilli paste of uniform texture and a jar of chilli crisp the word ‘harissa’ has it’s roots in the Arabic word ‘to pound’, though these days I think most harissa is made in the food processor, rather than by hand in a mortar and pestle. I’ll be pleasantly corrected if I’m wrong.
Use it to rub on lamb before roasting, to add depth and body as well as heat to soups and stews, pile it onto flatbreads with contrasting, cooling yogurt. If you’ve never had harissa before and you want to understand it’s flavours past simple heat I think the latter is the very best thing you can do for it: combine it with yogurt, perhaps adding a splash of fresh lemon juice if you think it needs a bit of a lift, and use it as a dip or a spread. You’ll taste all the flavours that make it such a special condiment just before the gentle (with yogurt at least), buildable heat hits you.
In The Times last weekend also came the excellent recommendation to use harissa to add warmth and complexity to your next Bloody Mary.
Whilst as a student I ate in enough Middle Eastern restaurants (yes Harissa is North African but it is also common in Israel, and so much food at the time was Ottolenghi inspired) in London to not be quite certain, I think my first taste of harissa I can at least pin point was at Pop Up Cafe in Deal, where I used to get their delicious salad boxes (in the summer, their daily soup and sourdough in winter) for lunch at least once a week when I worked in an office nearby.
It is a brilliant, neighbourhood cafe whose food has a Middle Eastern inflection and their homemade harissa was sweet, complex, and had just the right amount of heat - I was addicted to having a dollop of the stuff on most things, most days.
My first jar of harissa came hand in hand with the exciting discovery my new Waitrose in Canary Wharf when I moved back to London in 2017 had a kosher food section. I don’t keep kosher, but it is in the kosher section that so many nostalgic flavours from my grandmother kitchen can be found, so I naturally gravitate towards them.
But not harissa. Harissa was new to my kitchen and my families way of cooking.
First, on discovering the jar I’d grabbed - Tunisian-style, Providence Deli’s version was much rougher than the Belazu I now exclusively buy - and no good for dolloping on the side of things I discovered the sweet heat it could add to a beef stew, my version of which paid subscribers can find at the bottom of this post.
This was just ‘harissa’, a standard recipe of the ingredients listed above, and it was not until I started seeing harissa properly pop up in cookery books and food magazines past copies of Ottolenghi: the cookbook and Plenty (I think I’m privileged as a British food writer to have memories of cooking and consuming food media in the ‘before Ottolenghi’ as well as the ‘after Ottolenghi’ times when he pretty much single handedly expanded the range of world food items available in British supermarkets) did I discover rose harissa, the milder, more aromatic harissa made with the addition of rose petals I’d been looking for ever since the Pop Up Cafe ceased to be my daily office lunch spot.
So is the difference between ‘harissa’ and ‘rose harissa’ just the rose petals in the mixture?
Apparently yes, but honestly I can’t taste the floral, aromatic flavour the addition of rose petals is supposed to bring, I just know I prefer to buy the rose version because I find it more mellow, less in your face, and more tameable when I open up a jar at my kitchen counter. But, what I can recommend here for my British readers is Smoked Chilli Harissa which I think really does ring the changes in it’s recipe, providing a sultry, smoky finish similar to pure chipotle (chipotles are used in the recipe) but without the Mexican inflection and which I think is best suited to yogurt pairings: if you happen to have a copy of Olia Hercules’ brilliant book Home Food: recipes to comfort and connect (I’m legally obliged to tell you I was gifted this book by the publisher, but I do think it is excellent - I also suppose I should also mention I have a tonne of Belazu products in my kitchen too they’ve gifted me, though they’ve never sent me a jar of harissa) turn to the recipe for Lamb Cutlets in Kefir and Harissa Marinade on pg 25. This is a stunning treatment for lamb chops, and again I think is one of the very best things you can do with a jar of smoked chilli harissa.
Here is the space where I usually trail this months subscriber recipes, but as we’re changing things up a bit and now spreading those recipes throughout the month, instead I’m just going to point you to the recipe for Beef & Harissa Stew below, and to remind you to hit the subscribe button not to miss out on a transitional soup I’ve got coming next week that is just perfect as we head into spring, and a ‘something on toast’ recipe towards the end of the month that was originally meant for One Pan Pescatarian but was not quite finished by the time the book was.
Beef & Harissa Stew
Serves: 2-3 (could be stretched to 4 with a vegetable side), Preparation time: 10 minutes, Cooking time: 2 hours
Back when I was getting to know my slow cooker, there was a Slow Cooker Beef Stew on the Williams Sonoma website I made on repeat laced with harissa and spices. It was easy, hearty, something a bit different and I loved serving it with couscous at the end of a busy Saturday out and about in London. But then our lives changed a bit and slow cooker meals turned into things I genuinely think work better in a slow cooker like pulled pork, or things to put in on the rare occasion I know we’re going to be home late (tonight I’m trialing a tagine recipe as we have an invitation right over dinner time, but which does not include dinner!) I stopped making it. It was good, but it was not perfect.
It seems it took my returning to my AGA-cooking roots of cooking things slow and low in a Le Creuset was what was missing from the recipe; the hot, heady, harissa-oil laced broth that always pooled at the bottom of the couscous mountain never quite hit the spot: what it needed and which so many slow cooker recipes lack was flour as a thickener. Cooked the traditional way harissa, as well as an extra hit of the spices commonly found in harissa here lifts what is otherwise the simplest of beef stews cooked the way people have been doing it for centuries. Easy comfort food with a twist great for both the depths of winter and those cold, blustery, early spring days we’re still sporadically suffering. I wanted some during yesterdays storm.
If I’m doing dinner properly I serve this with couscous, a scattering of freshly chopped mint and a dollop of natural or Greek yogurt perked up with a little lemon juice. But I’ve also been known to eat it out of a bowl on the sofa with a hunk of crusty bread on the side.
400g diced stewing steak
salt and pepper
2 tbsp light oil
1 small onion
1 large garlic clove
1/2 tsp sweet smoked paprika
1/4 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tbsp plain flour
1 1/2 tbsp rose harissa
2 large carrots
1 medium potato
450ml beef stock
Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees and heat 1 tbsp of the oil over a medium high heat in a heavy lidded casserole. Season the beef well and brown in batches, removing from the dish with a slotted spoon as you go.
Add the rest of the oil and turn the heat down to medium. Gently fry the onion, finely chopped with a pinch of salt until just soft and turning golden. Add the garlic clove, crushed, and cook for a few minutes more.
Stir in the spices, and after a minute the flour. After another minute, stir in the harissa.
Add the carrots and potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped, followed by the stock. Stir to scrape off any brown bits from the bottom of the dish and add the beef back to the pot. Bring to the boil, clap on the lid, and transfer to the oven for 1 hour 45 minutes, checking after an hour to see if it needs a splash more water; it might if your oven runs a little hot, or if the lid of your casserole dish does not fit as well as mine does.
One of my all time favourite ingredients!