Harisa (Wheat and Chicken Beaten to One Paste)

Variations

• Harees (Arab): the same wheat and meat under a different name, and a national dish of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It uses lamb, beef or camel, is left to cool overnight before being beaten with a wooden stick, and is spread thin on the plate with ghee poured over. It is eaten at Ramadan and Eid. This page is the Armenian one.
• Without meat: during the Armenian Apostolic Church's fasting periods it is made with herbs in place of the meat. The only thing holding the paste together then is the wheat's own starch, so it wants longer stirring to reach the same consistency.
• With lamb: fattier than chicken, so halve the finishing butter. Simmer the bones for 90 minutes rather than 60.
• With cracked wheat (bulgur): soaks faster and collapses faster. There are no whole grains left to break, so step 6 is much shorter and the texture is porridge-like from the start.
• 24 April: it is also cooked and shared on the day commemorating the Armenian genocide, usually in a large cauldron with people taking turns at the spoon.

Tips

• The goal is not tenderness, it is the loss of the fibres. Most dishes that cook meat are choosing how much fibre you feel; this one cooks the meat in order to abolish the fibre bundles. Mandu says the same sentence in the other direction — "Salt draws myosin out of the meat, and that protein sets into a glue that holds the filling as one mass" is the aim there. That binds raw meat into a mass; this breaks cooked meat apart and scatters it through a grain. The same phrase describes opposite processes.
• Haggis is the same pairing with the opposite intent. Haggis also boils a grain and meat together for hours, and it wants them to stay apart: "the oatmeal in a haggis is there to stay in separate grains and refuse to bind". It toasts the oatmeal in a dry pan first to make sure of it. Harisa wants no grains left at all, so it does not toast the wheat — it soaks it overnight, which is the opposite preparation of the same ingredient.
• Fufu already explains the mechanical half. That page says "that stretch comes from gelatinised starch plus the sheer mechanical work of pounding". The work in step 6 is the same work, but there is meat in the pot at the same time, so one motion does two jobs: it frees the starch from the burst wheat and it cuts the strands of meat. There is no meat in the fufu mortar.
• Cooling the bird before picking it is not laziness. Pyeonyuk has the reason: the gelatine dissolved out of the collagen "it sets as it cools and glues the fibres into one block", which is what lets it be sliced at 2-3mm. The same set happens in a cooled chicken, so the muscle bundles hold and the meat strips off the bone in long pieces rather than crumbs. The dish builds the structure it is about to demolish. Pull the bird hot and you are stirring something already in fragments, which leaves step 6 nothing to do and gives a flat porridge.
• The wheat goes into the chicken broth, not into water. Stocks and broth says a stock is not a finished dish, and here there is no separate place for one to go. The liquid from step 2 is the cooking water in step 4, and the gelatine the bird gave up stays in it and supplies perhaps half the body of the finished paste. Change the liquid and the same consistency takes far longer.
• The butter is poured in the bowl, not stirred into the pot. This is where cooking oils separates a finishing fat from a cooking fat. Stirred in, it is absorbed and only makes the whole thing heavier; poured on top, it melts down through the hot wheat and every spoonful carries a different amount. How much each person stirs is how rich their bowl is.
• It keeps thickening as it cools. If it is exactly right when the heat goes off, a spoon will stand in it by the time it reaches the table. Hold back half a ladle of broth and loosen it at the last moment.