Chicken musakhan
Roast chicken is one of life's great pleasures, and in Palestine it's often made fragrant with cumin, sumac, cinnamon and allspice, slapped onto flatbreads and accompanied with fried onions and pine nuts. Simple yet incredibly satisfying.
This recipe is from Falastin: A Cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley (Ebury Press, £27). Photography by Jenny Zarins.
Musakhan is the hugely popular national dish of Palestine: growing up, Sami ate it once a week, pulling a piece of chicken and sandwiching it between a piece of pita or flatbread. It’s a dish to eat with your hands and with your friends, served from one pot or plate, for everyone to then tear at some of the bread and spoon over the chicken and topping for themselves.
Traditionally, musakhan was made around the olive oil pressing season in October or November to celebrate (and gauge the quality of) the freshly pressed oil. The taboon bread would be cooked in a hot taboon oven lined with smooth round stones, to create small craters in the bread in which the meat juices, onion and olive oil all happily pool. It’s cooked year-round, nowadays, layered with shop-bought taboon or pita bread, and is a dish to suit all occasions: easy and comforting enough to be the perfect weeknight supper as it is, but also special enough to stand alongside other dishes at a feast.
Ingredients
Metric
Imperial
- 1 chicken, weighing approx. 1.7kg, quartered, or 1kg of skin-on chicken supremes
- 120ml of olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
- 1 tbsp of ground cumin
- 3 tbsp of sumac
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp allspice powder
- 30g of pine nuts
- 3 large red onion, weighing approx. 500g, thinly sliced
- 4 flatbreads, ideally taboon or naan breads
- 5g of parsley, roughly chopped
- salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 300g of Greek-style yoghurt, to serve
- 1 lemon, quartered
Method
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