How to make a great Middle Eastern food dish, Stuffed Grape Leaves
I love politics but also love to cook. I watched my mother, Georgette, who was from Bethlehem, Palestine, cook for every holiday a meal plan that included Grape Leaves Stuffed with rice and diced lamb
By Ray Hanania
FREE/Middle East, Arab, Food, Recipe, Lamb, Rice Stuffed Grape Leaves/Sunday Dec. 29, 2024
My favorite Middle Eastern, Arab recipe is Stuffed Grape Leaves. The meal consists of rice mixed with diced lamb meat, cooked in a pot over chunks of lamb or even Ox-Tail in a process of steaming while boiling.
The meal is tedious but delicious.
I watched my mother make this dish almost every week, including during the holidays like Christmas and Easter. No one taught me to cook but being the child of an Arab mother from the beautiful land of Palestine and one of the most iconic cities, Bethlehem, and watching her prepare these seemingly complicated meals, was how I learned.
Mom cooked a lot, but I focused on Stuffed Grape Leaves. I love rice that is cooked to perfection, mixed with lightly spiced diced lamb, and then wrapped in a grape leaf picked from our grapevine in our yard, or picked from grapevines on the sides of roadways in the nearby forests.
In South American cultures, people use large banana leaves to wrap a wide range of food recipes, tied and then steamed or boiled or roasted. The leaf is intended to trap the flavor.
In South American recipes, like in Venezuela and Colombia where many of my mother’s Christian family fled during the Israeli invasion of Palestine in the 1940s, they use wrapsl like banana leaves to cook to enclose and preserve the flavors of what is being cooked without. directly burning the food. They also don’t eat the wraps like the banana leaf.
In contrast, in Stuffed Grape Leaves, the leaf is eaten along with the wrapped ingredients.
It is more tedious to wrap 200 grape leaves, one at a time, but like everything in life, far more time and effort goes into the production of a meal than the brief time it takes to eat it. But the sensation of the flavors during that brief time is spectacular.
I have several links to videos I have done over the year on Youtube. Keep in mind my focus was always on the making of the food, not the video. Videos have no taste. LOL. But food prepared to perfection does.
Here’s the basic overview of making Stuffed Grape Leaves:
You dice the lamb meat and slightly stew it in a pot. Don’t overcook it. Spice it, to your preference.
Next you mix the diced lamb with the rice. For every cup of diced meat, I add a 1/2 cup of rice. (Rice expands when cooked.)
You cook your favorite meats in the pot. Ox-Tail is one of my favorite, cooked sometimes along with chunks of lamb. Ox-Tail has to be cooked for at least 2 and one-half hours in a pot of water to bring it to succulent perfection, making it soft and tasty. Ox-Tail meat doesn’t harden like steak does when it is cooked for long periods in sauces or water.
I promise you it is simple and will get easier each time you try this. Measurements are a personal preference and are not precise. But never over spice. You can always add more spices later if you feel there isn’t enough.
Here are the basic ingredients you need:
Ziyad Brand grape leaves, or, Ziyad’s Alafia brand. Ziyad has the BEST food ingredients. I always use them.
Buy a large jar (16 Ounces), which includes about 200 leaves. The small jar (8 ounces), includes only about 90 leaves. Open the jars when ready to wrap. Rinse the leaves and put them in another metal container where you will individually pick a leaf one at a time when you start wrapping.
Leg of lamb, 4 to 5 lbs which you can purchase from most mainstream grocery stores.
One package of Ox-Tails from the local grocer. (Ox-Tail is great with any dish.)
One can of diced tomatoes with garlic.
Extra Virgin Olive oil. (You’ll put two to three tablespoons of olive oil in the boiling meat pot.)
Your favorite rice. Whatever rice you use, you have to rinse it at least four times, rubbing the rice in your fingers each time to remove the starch which makes rice sticky and mushy.
Dice half an onion.
Here is the recipe.
POT: Use a large pot that you have a cover for. Put the Ox-Tail into the pot right away. Cover the meat with water and set the flame to medium. Keep the water just above the meat so you will keep adding water as it evaporates.
Skin most of the fat from the Leg of Lamb and put the fat in the pot, pushing it to the bottom, under the meat, to add more flavor. Dice the onion and put in the pot.
Take about two-thirds of the leg of lamb and cut it into 3 to 4-inch chunks. The remaining third will be diced and mixed with the rice.
Put the lamb chunks into the pot with the boiling Ox-Tails.
And 2 beef bullion cubes into the watery mix of the pot. (Don’t over-spice it. You can always add spice to your own taste preferences afterwards.)
Cook the pot about 60 minutes before going to the next step. (You want the meat to boil at least 2 hours when you are ready to add the rolled grape leaves.)
FRYING PAN: At this point, mix the diced lamb meat with diced steak meat. I use a RibEye steak.
The meat doesn’t have to be diced “tiny.” The meat with shrink when cooked but you want the meat slices to be small — thin and not more than a 1/4 inch in length. Just dice it up as best as you can.
Put all the diced meat in a large frying pan. Don’t add oil. Fry at medium heat and keep mixing until it all browns. It will create its own juices.
I add Cumin to the diced meat mix.
Once the meat is browned, put it in a small pot with the juices and add the rice that you rinsed off 4 to 5 times (rubbing the rice with your fingers during each rinse), into the mix.
Open the can of tomatoes and empty the sauce into the slightly cooked and diced meat mix, and rice mix. (I use the metal top removed with the can opener to push the tomatoes down.)
NOTE: Empty the tomato chunks left in the tomato can into the cooking pot with the Ox Tail and Lamb Chunks.
Mix the diced meats and rice as consistently and as evenly as you can.
Set aside for a moment.
Open the jar of grape leaves and carefully remove the bunched leaves. They are usually 45 or so in a bunch and then rolled into one segment, with four in a jar.
Rinse the leaves off. Put them in a pot and then drain the water as much as possible from the pot.
Rolling the leaves. (“Lif warrick” in Arabic)
Take one leaf at a time. Open it carefully and the shiny side down. Make sure the stems are removed from the leaves. (In the Alafia and Ziyad brands, the stems are usually all removed. In other brands they are not.)
I use a teaspoon to lift some rice and lamb mix and place it in a “line” against where the stem is. You roll the leaf flaps over it from the back one time. Fold the leaf sides over the roll, and finish rolling until it forms a “finger” or a “cigar.”
You do this over and over again until all of the diced lamb and rice mix is used.
Put the Rolled leaves into the boiling pot.
Check the boiling pot of Ox Tail and lamb chucks to ensure that the broth is slightly above the meat. Even out the meat if you have to as best as you can. If the broth level is low, just add water to raise the level.
It takes about 60 minutes to roll all the leaves. The pot itself has probably been boiling for about 60 minutes before you even got the point of rolling the grape leaves. You want that meat to boil for about 60 minutes before you start preparing the grape leaves mixes.
Usually, you will have some leftover leaves when the rolling is done. Use them to cover the meat and broth to create a “shelf”.
What happens is you will be steaming the wrapped or rolled leaves and they won’t all be soaked in the broth.
Carefully place the individual rolled Stuffed Grape Leaves into the pot on top of the extra leaves. In the center, have them all “point in one direction.” Around the edge of the pot, put the rolled leaves perpendicular to the pot side, pointing inwards. (This keeps the grape leaves from sinking along the sides of the pot into the boiling broth.
Cover the pot, reduce the flame to low, and cook for 45 to 60 minutes.
Once done.
Pick out the cooked Stuffed Grape Leaves and place them in a dish. (Keep it organized, all placed in one direction so they are easier to serve.)
Remove the meats and put them in a serving dish.
Keep some of the broth in a side dish as a sauce when eating.
Enjoy. In Arabic, we say, Sahtein!
Here are some YouTube videos I have made over the years that might help. Consider Subscribing (free) to my YouTube channel. There is a lot there:
July 2024. Click this link.
April 2022. Click this link
(At the 2 minute mark of the video it shows you how to roll the grape leaves.)
March 2012 (With my young son Aaron) Click this link.
(At the 20 minute mark of the video it shows how to roll the grape leaves.)