Mujadara (Lentils & Rice with Fried Onions)

Name: Mujadara (Lentils & Rice with Fried Onions)
Total time: 1 h
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Levantine
Ingredients: 200 g Brown or green lentils; 150 g Long-grain rice; 500 g Onions; 90 ml Olive oil; 1 1/2 tsp Ground cumin; 1/2 tsp Ground coriander; 1 1/2 tsp Salt; 1/2 tsp Black pepper; 700 ml Water; to serve Plain yogurt or cucumber salad

Four ingredients and one trick: onions fried far past golden into near-black sweetness, half stirred through the lentils and rice, half piled on top.

Fonte

Ricetta di Lebanese home kitchens · 🏺 Tradizionale · Lebanese household cooking

Lebanese / Levantine home cooking — A dish of cooked lentils together with groats — generally rice — garnished with sautéed onions, especially popular in the Levant. It is old, cheap and meat-free, which is why it recurs through fasting seasons across the region's communities. There is no single author: proportions and spicing shift household to household, and the version here follows the common Lebanese ratio of roughly 4 parts lentils to 3 parts rice by weight.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

Watch it being made · 3 videos

Zaatar and Zaytoun Unicorns in the Kitchen Food Impromptu

⏱ 60 min🍽 4 porzioni🔥 380 kcal🇱🇧 Libano

VeganoVegetarianoSenza latticiniSenza frutta a guscioHalal

Passaggi

Rinse the lentils and pick out any stones. Rinse the rice separately until the water runs clear, then leave it to soak.
Put the lentils in a pot with 700 ml water and bring to a boil.
Drop to a simmer and cook 15–20 minutes, until the lentils are tender but still whole — they should give when pressed, not burst.
💡 Do not salt them yet. Salt early and the skins toughen and stay chalky no matter how long you boil them.
While the lentils cook, halve the onions and slice them thinly and evenly.
Heat the olive oil in a wide frying pan over medium heat and add all the onions at once.
Fry them 20–25 minutes, stirring often. They will go translucent, then golden, then deep brown.
💡 This is the entire dish and it cannot be hurried. Twenty-five minutes sounds absurd for onions; it is not. Every minute you cut is sweetness you will not get back, and mujadara has nothing else to hide behind.
Push them to deep mahogany brown — darker than you are comfortable with — but pull them the instant you smell any bitterness.
💡 There is a narrow window between deeply caramelized and burnt, and it is maybe 60 seconds wide. Brown is sweet; black is bitter and unfixable. Trust your nose over the clock.
Lift half the onions out onto paper towel and set them aside — these are for the top.
Add the cumin, coriander, salt and pepper to the onions left in the pan and stir for 30 seconds, until they smell fragrant.
Tip the pan's contents — onions, spices and their oil — into the pot of lentils.
💡 That dark oil is pure onion flavour. Scrape the pan out properly; leaving it behind is throwing away the best thing in the dish.
Drain the soaked rice and stir it into the lentils. Check the water — it should sit about 2 cm above the surface.
Bring it to a boil, then drop to the lowest heat, cover tightly, and cook 15 minutes without lifting the lid.
💡 Every peek releases the steam that is cooking the rice. If you must check, do it once at 12 minutes and close it fast.
Take it off the heat and let it stand, still covered, for 10 minutes.
Fluff it with a fork, pile the reserved onions on top, and serve warm or at room temperature with yogurt or cucumber salad.

💡 Consigli

Beginner's mistake: stopping the onions at golden. Golden onions give you a pleasant lentil pilaf. Mujadara wants them almost burnt — that near-black sweetness is the only strong flavour in a dish of lentils, rice and water, and it is the whole reason people love it.
Red lentils will not work. They have no skin and collapse into purée in ten minutes — you would end up with orange porridge. Brown, green or the small dark Puy lentils all hold.
Mujadara is peasant food — lentils, rice, onions, oil — and is eaten across the Levant during Lent and fasting periods precisely because it is meat-free and cheap. It is vegan as written, no substitutions needed.
It is arguably better the next day, cold, with yogurt. Do not microwave it back to hot — mujadara at room temperature is how it is usually eaten anyway.