Description: By ear, often, it is perceived as "harisa". This is the specificity of pronunciation in the Armenian language. Very useful hearty meal, simple in content, but very, time-consuming and lengthy in preparation. I was taught to cook it by my close friends from Gyumri (Leninakan). In this recipe, I will offer several tricks, quite well-known even without me, to facilitate the preparation of this wonderful dish without losing palatability. At least this recipe, at the time of publication on this site, is the only one as close as possible to the original.
Cooking time: 300 minutes
Servings: 6
Purpose:
For kids:
For breakfast
For breakfast:
hearty breakfast
For lunch
For an afternoon snack
Special meals:
For diet
Ingredients for "Armenian harissa":
- Chicken (1.5 - 2 kg) - 1 pc.
- Wheat groats - 300 g
- Butter (originally melted) - 150 g
- Salt (to taste) - 1 tbsp. l.
Recipe "Armenian harissa":
In the original, harissa is brewed from whole wheat. Chicken and wheat are poured with water and boiled with continuous stirring for about 5 hours. The bones, as they separate, are brought to the surface and removed. Everything should turn into a homogeneous paste-like mass. For 5 hours from this procedure, you can go crazy (I tried it))), so I bring to your attention a modern version, but without a blender. This I do not recognize in arisa. I took the wheat fast food(three such bags), already peeled.
And soaked it overnight in water room temperature. Then washed well. As a result, the wheat softened and swelled. What you need.
My chicken is medium in size. Actually, it all depends on the amount of harissa you want to cook. For more than 6 servings, you can take a large domestic chicken, but at the same time trim the fat from it before preparing the broth. By adding butter, we already introduce the required amount of fat into this dish.
Fill the chicken with water and put on fire. It is recommended to cook the chicken over low heat and longer so that the meat separates from the bones as easily as possible. If desired, you can add carrots, whole onions, bay leaves, and peppercorns during the cooking process for the best taste of the broth, only then throw it all away. We, as a result, need only boned meat and strained broth.
So the chicken is cooked. We take it out and cool it for cutting,
and strain the broth. He will be liquid base for arisa.
We cut the chicken into small pieces. The smaller the better.
Put the chicken pieces and wheat into the pan.
Fill with water and put on fire. I recommend stirring the arisu with a wooden spatula.
Bring the rice to a boil and start stirring. The main task is that the arisa does not burn.
To do this, gradually reduce the fire to a minimum.
After half an hour, arisa acquires such a still rough texture. As it thickens, add chicken broth little by little.
After another half an hour, the meat fibers become hardly noticeable.
And after another hour, the arisa begins to lighten. Good sign - half way behind. I want to draw your attention to the fact that during the whole process I gradually added the broth, and as a result I added the whole, about three and a half liters. At this point, I added salt.
It is worth noting that harissa is, for the most part, a male dish. The history of its appearance is rooted in biblical times, and the ancient Armenian warriors came up with the arisu during long military campaigns. In the photo we see how the harissa festival is held in Armenia.
So, back to our preparation. After another hour, my arisa acquired a lighter shade and an almost creamy consistency, which indicates the completion of the process.
Butter, and preferably ghee, it is customary to add already to the plate. Feel free to take a small pack for such an amount of arisa. Butter will not spoil the porridge))
This is how we serve fragrant, nutritious and satisfying arisu to the table.
Bari ahorzhak!
Traditional dish of Armenian cuisine: ARISA (accent on last syllable) . This dish is usually prepared during the cold season. This food does not tolerate fuss, arisu you need to cook and eat slowly. As a rule, on arisu friends and relatives gather at a large table, enjoy each other's company and great food.
The classic harisa is made with chicken and wheat. The appropriate wheat is needed: Armenian dzavar groats. If you try to describe this dish for clarity, then we can say that it is a thick viscous wheat porridge with Chiken.
I cooked from homemade chicken - it turned out fragrant, words can not convey
1 - 1.5 kg chicken
500g. wheat groats(dzawar)
water, salt
drain oil
This is what the dzawar looks like 
Peel the chicken, wash it, divide it into pieces and put it on the bottom of a heavy-bottomed pan. Wash the grits well and cover the chicken with it. Pour 8 glasses of water and put on fire (in general, water is taken at the rate of 4-5 glasses per 1 glass of cereal). 
Salt, close the lid, bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a minimum and leave to simmer for 2.5 -3 hours.
In the process, look, if all the water has been absorbed into the cereal, you need to add a little bit. 
As soon as the grains increase in size several times and become completely soft, the process of turning "porridge" into "Harisa" begins:
remove the pieces of chicken on a plate, separate all the meat from the bones.
Traditionally, porridge was "whipped" with a wooden spoon or spatula until it became viscous. But I went the easy way and used a simple device called a blender for this purpose.
Return the meat to the pot, add
"Harisa" is a traditional Armenian dish, the main ingredients of which are wheat and a large amount of poultry meat. Every year on February 27 in Armenia, officially declared as the day of Harissa, the traditional dish is cooked in huge quantities, families gather, a large friendly company and treat themselves to a delicious and hearty dinner.
Usually this dish is cooked in 30-40 liter pans and takes about 7-8 kilograms. chicken meat, 4 kilograms of wheat. But we will prepare a small portion, for about 20 people. We need 3 kilograms of chicken meat and 1.5-2 kilograms of wheat. Get ready for the fact that the dish will cook for a very long time, about 10 hours, until the meat is boiled and moves away from the bones. The cooking method is very, very simple. Any housewife will be able to cook this dish, even if she cooks Arisa for the first time.
Cooking method
1. Sort the wheat very carefully.
2. Fill with water, rinse well, leave for 10 minutes. Then pour out the water and rinse under running water a second time. The wheat must be very clean.
3. Turn on the gas, pour water into the pan (almost to the very edge) and cook over high heat until boiling, you do not need to close the lid.
4. After washing and working out the chicken meat, put it into the pan. if you have whole chicken, it is better to use it, directly whole, put it in processed form on wheat and bring to a boil.
5. When the water begins to boil in the broth, foam begins to form, it must be removed. Cover the pot with a lid and reduce the heat to the lowest possible. It will take a very long time to cook, about 10 hours. When the meat begins to delaminate and move away from the bones, this means that the food is ready! At the very end, 5 minutes before turning off, add salt and mix. After 5-10 minutes, turn off the gas and proceed to the next step.
6. Mix the porridge well and remove the large bones from the dish, let the small ones remain, they can be removed from the plate already during the meal.
7. At the end, you need to peel the onion, wash, cut into rings or half rings and fry for sunflower oil.
When serving, pour onion fried porridge over the porridge and enjoy the divine taste of the national dish of Armenian cuisine.
Interested in the meaning of the word "harisa", I was surprised to learn that in different national cuisines world exist culinary specialties under the same name, but they belong to different categories.
In some, this word means spicy sauce, in others - meat dishes (mashed soup or porridge), and in others - sweetness. There is harisa and the Armenians. The name of this dish they have means "interfere" or "mix".
Although in Armenia it is not customary to focus on any dishes at Christmas, harisa is still considered the most popular Christmas dish there. holiday table. By the way, it looks a bit like our kutya, because it is also made from wheat, but it tastes unsweetened, and even with meat.
Interestingly, traditionally Armenian harissa For a long time, locals ate like this: they took a piece of pita bread, collected harisa porridge with it, and only then dipped the pita bread in ghee.
Armenian harissa homemade recipe
Grocery list:
- 2st wheat
- 1 whole chicken or turkey
- some water
- salt, ghee - take to taste
Cooking process:
- Chicken (turkey) cut into pieces is placed in a cast-iron bowl or a pan with a thick bottom and poured with water.
- Then wheat is poured into the same container and salt is added.
- Cook everything together for a very long time (at least two to three hours) over low heat.
- Once upon a time harisu it was served on the table along with the bones of a boiled bird, but modern Armenian housewives do it differently.
- When the boiled meat begins to lag behind the bones on its own, they take it out and, separating it completely from the bones, return it to the cereal, then continue to cook the food further, stirring and gradually adding water until the meat turns into meat strings, and the wheat into a solid mass .
Armenian cuisine is very interesting and delicious. It has such traditional dishes, which have more than one century, for example, or. And although, in principle, the same products are used as in other national cuisines, each dish bears a special imprint. Many dishes of Armenian cuisine have gained wide popularity, such as, for example.
Recently I was visiting a friend. She is Armenian, but for many generations her family has been living in Russia. However, they continue to prepare their National dishes, and this time there was Armenian wheat porridge with chicken on the table. I never thought that from ordinary wheat and chicken you can cook such yummy! Such porridge is called garisa or harisa, and naturally I immediately wrote down the recipe for porridge Harisa. However, when I found out how long it takes to cook, I was a little depressed: with my schedule, I can cook it only on weekends.
But my friend reassured me: it turns out that this unusual porridge is also prepared in an unusual way. For example, she cooked the chicken in the evening and soaked the wheat, and in the morning she simply put all the ingredients in a cauldron, topped up the water to the maximum, put the cauldron on the divider on the minimum fire, covered it with a lid and went to work. And in the evening, when she returned, she just stirred the porridge with a pusher, and that was it. So this dish, although it requires a lot of time, but at least attention.
Calories: medium calorie
Calories per serving: 140 kcal
To cook Armenian wheat porridge with chicken, you will need:
chicken (weighing 1-1.5 kg) - 1 pc.
wheat - 500 g
salt - to taste
bay leaf - to taste
Armenian wheat porridge with chicken is prepared like this.
1. If you have a whole chicken, gut it, tar and cut off the head and legs. If the chicken is store-bought, that is, gutted, without paws and a head, then just wash it.
2. Fill the chicken cold water, then drain the water, place the chicken in a deep saucepan (preferably a cauldron), fill with water and cook until the chicken is completely boiled. Don't forget to skim off the foam!
3. Meanwhile, soak the wheat.
4. Remove the finished chicken from the broth, cool and separate the meat from the skin and bones.
5. In the broth in which the chicken was cooked, return the chicken, cut into pieces, add the soaked wheat, salt, mix, tightly cover the cauldron with a lid and put it on a divider on a small fire.
6. Cook over medium heat for 3-4 hours, stirring constantly so that the porridge quickly acquires the desired consistency. If you do not have the opportunity to constantly stir the porridge, then make a minimum fire, but then you have to cook for 6-7 hours.
7. As a result, chicken meat practically dissolves in boiled wheat, and a solid mass is obtained, the consistency of which resembles mashed potatoes. Put bay leaves in the porridge, cover with a lid and let it cook on low heat for another 10-15 minutes.
Serve Armenian wheat porridge with hot chicken sprinkled with sweet fried onions as an independent dish. Pickles are perfect for it - pickles and tomatoes, sauerkraut etc.
