Somali Rice and Beef

All I ever knew of cinnamon was its sweet side until a Somali woman showed me how she puts it in her beef and rice. See below for the recipe, how-to photos, cooking class, and story.

Recipe - Somali rice and beef

Somali Rice and Beef

As a woman from Mogadishu, Somalia, taught Lindsay Sterling in Portland, ME 2013

Serves 4-6

Cooking time: 45 minutes

1 chicken bouillion cube or packet

2 shakes lemon pepper

Or pinch black pepper, dash lemon juice

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon or 1 cinnamon stick

1 Tbsp + 1/4 tsp whole cumin

1 Tbsp + 1/4 tsp whole coriander

3 cups white long grain rice

1/2 yellow onion, minced + 1/2 yellow onion, sliced

2 Tbsp vegetable oil + 2 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 lb. beef sliced into 1/4" slices

1/2 tsp Goya sazon con achiote or Indian red food coloring

ingredients for salad

oil and vinegar for dressing

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bring 6 cups of water to a boil. Soak rice. Cook meat in a separate pot, just covered with water on high.

In a separate medium to large pot (with tight fitting lid), saute diced yellow onion in 2 Tbsp oil. Grind all whole cumin and coriander in spice grinder together. Add 2 Tbsp of the ground spices to the cooking onions (leaving a half tsp or so for the meat later on). Also mix into the onions cinnamon, bouillon, lemon pepper, and salt. Add the rice to the spiced onions and oil. Saute  for a couple minutes, stirring to incorporate the flavorful oil throughout and to prevent burning. Add boiling water to cover the rice by 3/4 inch. Cover rice and place in oven to cook for twenty minutes.

When the meat has cooked long enough in the water to be tender, drain any excess water from the pan (hers had all evaporated by then), and add 2 Tbsp of oil, sliced onion, about 1/2 tsp of ground coriander and cumin, and salt to taste. Fry meat until it's golden brown in parts. Turn off heat.

Sprinkle Sazon con culantro y achiote or red food coloring on the top of the rice. Mix so that the rice has some red flecks in it. Serve rice with meat and onions on top. Somalians often serve this with a fresh salad (lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers) with oil and vinegar dressing.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2013

See How to Do It

Somali rice and beef.

Saute onion in oil.

Add a bouillon cube or packet.

Add spices: lemon pepper, and cumin and coriander blended together.

And cinnamon and water. Cover and cook for 20 min. in a 350 degree oven.

Cut beef into quarter inch slices.

 

Boil beef until tender. Then drain water (if there's any left), and add oil. Fry meat with onions and coriander, cumin and salt.



She cooked her rice covered in the oven. Then she sprinkled some Goya sazon con achiote for the red color on top. If in Somalia, she would likely use red food coloring from India. Achiote is a Latin American spice that makes foods that delicious red color. It's used to color yellow cheddar in the U.S. She discovered it from a friend in Minnesota.

Here's the packet of Sazon con culantro y achiote so you can see what it looks like.



Here is the actual dish she served me while she was in the midst of teaching me how to cook some other dishes. It doesn't look nearly as good as it tastes.



I heard from some other Somalian women in the Somalian market that this rice and meat dish is often served with salad of fresh lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, and oil and vinegar dressing. When I made the meal at home, the salad made the dish more photogenic.




I truly enjoyed this meal. My seven-year-old gobbled it up without even asking what country it was from. The nine-year-old put up a stink because she thought we were having meatball subs that night. She asked me, "Why do you like foreign food?" I said, "Ever since I ate at an Ethiopian restaurant in San Francisco, I always have. I just loved it and really wanted to know how to make it." She fixed herself something quick she could eat instead - celery and hummus, noting, "Hummus is spelled weird."
I replied, "That's because it's Turkish or something."
Neither of us realized at the time how funny this was. I'm laughing now.

The Story

Cinnamon’s Secret Identity

It’s a Meat Lover!

By Lindsay Sterling

Learning to cook with exotic ingredients is exciting, but what I like even better is seeing an immigrant use an uber-familiar ingredient in a completely new way. It’s both uncomfortable and invigorating. One minute you think you know something about an ingredient, and then the next minute you see that you don’t know the half of it. This happened last month when I was cooking with a Somali woman in the Riverton neighborhood of Portland.

She was making a dish her family eats often for lunch: spiced rice topped with beef. In Somali, this is called bariis iyo hilib lo. Translation: rice and meat beef. She was sauteeing diced onion in oil and adding freshly ground spices: coriander and cumin, chicken bouillon, and salt, and then she added cinnamon. If I hadn’t had a social filter, I would have said, “Ah! What are you doing? Cinnamon is for cinnamon buns, not beef dishes!”

            This wasn’t the first time I couldn’t believe what an immigrant was doing with cinnamon. The Afghani woman had put cinnamon in her lamb. The Indians put cinnamon in their prawn curry, chicken biryani, and chicken tandoori. The Iraqi woman boiled a chicken with a cinnamon stick. The Eritrean woman put cinnamon in the spice mixture that went in her spicy chicken stew. So this has basically been the trend. Immigrants put cinnamon in their meat dishes and I, the American, freak out. At home, one of my hands has to force the other to put the cinnamon in these dishes.

Why am I so resistant to cinnamon going savory? As I’ve learned from cooking and tasting these immigrant dishes, cinnamon by itself is not sweet. It is mildly spicy, aromatic and drying. It activates the middle of the palate, and works well with other middle flavors like cloves, cumin and meat. In the Indian and Eritrean dishes, the cinnamon has a stabilizing or grounding effect on the zippy heat of super-hot chilis. In the Somali beef and rice dish, the cinnamon, cumin, coriander and chicken broth lend substance and body to the meal. It’s so much better with spices than plain!

For context, cinnamon was around long before the American psyche. According to one theory, traders were floating rafts of bark from Indonesia to east Africa as early as 2000 B.C. Then from east Africa, cinnamon traveled up through ports in the Red Sea and over land to Alexandria, from where it was shipped to other ports along the Mediterranean. Cinnamon traders were likely Arabs, but after 1518, the Portuguese, Dutch, and English cut out the Arab middlemen in the cinnamon trade by going themselves to an island off the coast of India (Sri Lanka), where cinnamon grew like gangbusters. Almost as soon as Western Europeans got their hands on their own direct supply of cinnamon, they also started producing their own supplies of a new ingredient, sugar, in the new world. From what I understand, it was right then that the two sides of cinnamon diverged: sweet and savory.

I’m humbled to realize that cinnamon had something like a 3500-year culinary history before sugar was even discovered! Cinnamon Toast Crunch is just the most recent tip of the iceberg. Underneath, I’m pretty sure, are millennia of cinnamon and meat.