Chicken fricassee in Lebanese – Fatteh
Well, you can’t really call it chicken fricassee, but it’s – well – a bit close. There’s chicken in it and there’s a delicious sauce 😉 But actually, this fantastic dish is called fatteh.
Fatteh comes in many different varieties – the best known and probably most popular is the one with chicken. Okay, but what is fatteh anyway? Fatteh means “plucked” or “plucked”. The word is also in fattoush, by the way. Both recipes have one delicious thing in common: crispy, pulled or broken pita bread.
In this recipe, the pita bread is baked in the oven until really crispy, then broken up (you can of course cut it into no pieces or tear it beforehand) and it then forms a delicious base for the chicken, the tahini yoghurt sauce and the tender chickpeas. And because that’s not quite enough, add a few fresh herbs and pine nuts roasted in ghee or butter.
Crispy, tender, savoury, fresh and nutty – the taste is fabulous. I love taking a piece of pita bread from the bottom layer and having all the components on it.
We like to have the whole thing for breakfast at the weekend. Yes, the Lebanese like it hearty in the morning 🙂
But of course, fatteh is also a fantastic lunch or dinner. So don’t let any time of day stop you – unless you have a date that day… Garlic alert!
By the way, for once I didn’t get this recipe from my mother, but from my father. He loved to prepare it for us at the weekend for brunch and my mother also enjoyed being cooked by my father. Unfortunately, that was almost 10 years ago… Fatteh is therefore always a reminder of a loved one for me.
Recipe for Fatteh
Ingredients
Chicken
- 4 Chicken thighs
- 400 g cooked chickpeas
- 1 Onion
- 1 Bay leaf
- 1 Carnation
- 1/2 Cinnamon stick
- 1 Carrot
- 1 Cardamom pod
- 2 TSP Salt
- 2 Allspice
Yoghurt tahini sauce
- 300 g Yogurt
- 3 EL Tahini
- 2 TBSP Lemon juice
- 2 Garlic cloves
- 3 EL Water
- 1/2 TSP Cumin
- Salt, pepper
Also
- 4 Lebanese flatbreads
- 1 handful flat leaf parsley
- 2 twigs fresh mint
- 1 pinch dried mint
- 1 Handful Pine nuts
- 1 EL Ghee
Zubereitung
Chicken
- Peel and halve the onion.
- Put all the ingredients for the chicken in a pot and cover everything with water.
- Simmer the chicken on medium heat for about 35 minutes.
Sauce
- Peel the garlic and crush it in a mortar.
- Put the garlic in a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients for the sauce and mix everything together. Then season with salt.
Almost ready
- Preheat the oven to 180 °C and bake the flatbread until it is lightly brown and crispy. Then take the flatbread out of the oven and break it into irregularly sized pieces.
- Melt the ghee in the pan and briefly roast the pine nuts in it.
- Chop some mint and parsley.
- Take the chicken thighs out of the broth and separate the meat from the skin and bones. The meat may fray a little in the process.
- Divide some pita bread and the chicken on the plates, put some pita bread on top again, then the sauce and the chickpeas cooked in the broth.
- To finish, pour some pine nuts with ghee over the sauce and garnish the plates with fresh and dried mint and parsley.
