Mumbar Dolması
Sheep’s casing stuffed with rice, onions and spices, poached then grilled. Turkish cousin of the Tunisian osban and the Egyptian mombar: the three form a family of rice-stuffed sausages that stretches across the eastern Mediterranean.
| Medium-grain rice (baldo or calrose) | 300 g |
| Minced lamb | 200 g |
| Onion, finely chopped | 120 g |
| Crushed tomato | 100 g |
| Turkish pepper paste (biber salçası) | 30 g |
| Tomato purée | 20 g |
| Dried mint | 8 g |
| Ground cumin | 6 g |
| Aleppo pepper (pul biber) | 8 g |
| Fine salt | 15 g |
| Ground black pepper | 3 g |
| Olive oil | 30 ml |
| Butter | 30 g |
| Wide sheep casing | — |
- Preparing the rice: Rinse the rice, then drain. In a pan, fry the onion in the butter. Add the minced meat, then brown. Add the tomato, the pepper paste, the purée, the mint, the cumin, the pul biber (chilli flakes), the salt and the pepper. Add the raw rice, then stir for 2 minutes.
- Stuffing: Fill the cleaned casings with the rice stuffing, without packing too tightly: the rice swells in cooking. Close the ends with a knot or twine.
- Poaching: Plunge the mumbar into a large pot of barely simmering salted water. Cook for 45 minutes over gentle heat. The rice should be cooked, and the casing tender.
- Grilling: Remove the mumbar, drain it, then grill over embers or in a pan, with a drizzle of olive oil, for 5 to 8 minutes, until a golden crust forms.
- Serving: Slice into thick rounds and serve with garlic yoghurt and a sumac-and-onion salad.
The mumbar dolması is a sheep’s casing filled with raw rice, minced lamb, onions and pepper paste (biber salçası), then poached and grilled. This double cooking is the gesture that separates it from the other stuffed casings of Anatolian cooking: the poaching cooks the rice and softens the casing, while the grilling gives it a golden, crackling skin that poaching alone cannot produce.
The word mumbar comes from Arabic and designates the large intestine. It is found in related forms throughout the former Ottoman space, from the Maghreb to the Caucasus. The mumbar shares with the Tunisian-Libyan osban and the Egyptian mombar a single logic of using the casing as the container for a mixture of grain and meat, the three preparations probably belonging to a common Ottoman tradition diffused in distinct directions.
Technical success depends on the stuffing dosage. The rice goes in raw and swells during the poaching: an overfilled casing bursts. The use of baldo or calrose rice, medium-grained and low-absorbency, is preferred to long-grain rice. The Turkish pepper paste, worked into the mixture, seasons the rice from within and gives it its characteristic orange colour.
It is served in thick rounds, with garlic yoghurt and a sumac-and-onion salad. Its preparation, long and painstaking, reserves it for family occasions and large tables. It appears regularly at Iftar meals during Ramadan in the provinces of south-eastern Anatolia, where it is most prevalent.
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