For our third African country in this streak, we head to Libya, which makes for a nice variety – Lesotho in the far south, Liberia in the west, and Libya on the Medditeranean coast.

One fun thing we’re learning is the variety of different ways the same ingredients are used around the world.  I’ve joked that at some point we’ll run the statistics on how many entries on this blog start with “Now chop up an onion”, but there’s other parallels as well.

For example, our Irish meal was a lamb stew with barley.  THIS is a lamb stew with barley.  But despite the fact that the top line description is the same, these two dishes are (unsurprisingly) nothing alike.

For starters, rather than whole barley, this recipe calls for barley flour.  Now, we didn’t find barley flour at any of our nearby stores, but rather than go further afield, we just bought barley, and stuck it in a barely-on oven for a bit to dry it out. (or is that a BARLEY-on oven?  har, har, har)

We then fed it in batches through our spice grinder.  Took a bit, because barley is quite hard, and we didn’t want to burn out the motor, but eventually we had a nice bowl of barley flour.  Just to be sure, we sifted the bowl, and anything that didn’t make it through the sieve went back into the grinder for a bit.

OK, so – what are we DOING with this barley flour?  We’re making bazeen, one of the national dishes of Libya.  It consists of a single large dumpling, which is then broken apart and used to eat a spicy lamb stew.

Alright, what do we do first? It couldn’t possibly be chop up and sautee an onion, could it?

Natch.

Also visible in that picture are chopped green chiles and fenugreek seed.  We always have to pause when a recipe just calls for “fenugreek,” because both the leaves and the seeds are used in different parts of the world, and the taste is substantially different.  In this case, however, our original recipe had lots of pictures, so we were able to confirm that seeds were intended here.

To be clear, we don’t MIND that most recipes start with sauteeing onions, because sauteeing onions smell delicious, and the spices didn’t hurt that at all.

Next up, lamb, and in this case we used shoulder, because leg is three times as expensive. The recipe just shows this going in as big hunks, so big hunks we did.

This goes into the pot with the onions to brown a bit, and then in go the remainder of the spices and broth.  Spices in this case are garlic, tomato paste, tumeric (LOTS of tumeric), chili powder (lots of that, too), black pepper, and salt.

After the lamb has cooked for about an hour, you toss in some potatoes to cook in the by now extremely aromatic broth.

And with about 45 minutes to go on the stew, it’s time to get moving on our dumpling.  And at this point, I was starting to seriously doubt our process, since it was so unlike anything we’d done before.  But again – the initial recipe had PICTURES, so we could tell we were at least matching it.

To make the dumpling, you dump a mix of barley and wheat flour into a pot and pour boiling water around it.  You also make a well in the middle of the flour for water to bubble up into. And then… you don’t stir, and you don’t cover.  Which means that at the end of the cooking process you still have a whole bunch of visible, dry flour.

This can’t be right, can it?  It’s still largely a powder! But it is apparently a COOKED powder, so… that’s OK?

We decided to soldier on and see what happens.  Flour and water gets dumped into the stand mixer (or kneaded by hand, if you have asbestos fingers) and kneaded to a somewhat gluey dough.

And then supposedly you roll that dough into a big ball, but  … wait, that worked?

Huh.  OK, let’s plate this puppy.

This… looks almost exactly like the picture in the recipe, with the exception that we left out the hard boiled eggs, because we don’t actually LIKE hard boiled eggs. We were somewhat baffled that we had succeeded, but it appeared that we had.

The instructions say that you tear off pieces with your right hand and eat the stew that way. Problem: at no point is it revealed when you change “large hunks of potato and lamb” into “bite sized pieces of potato and lamb.”  So after one or two attempts at tearing bits of lamb off with our fingers, we just went and got cutlery.

It was definitely tasty, though!  The dumpling didn’t taste raw, and was a nice chewy sop for the stew.  The lamb and potatoes also both did good jobs of soaking up the sauce.  We had lots of leftovers on this one, and they all got eaten.

Next up, a country which has now lost two football matches in a row to the worst team in the world.

Recipe:
Bazeen