• Recipes
• Second course
• Dumplings
• Shish barak (lebanese lamb dumplings in yogurt sauce)

Shish barak are little, ravioli-like dumplings filled with seasoned lamb, onions, and pine nuts that are boiled, baked, or fried and served in a warm yogurt sauce with melted butter, mint, sumac, and toasted pine nuts. They are made in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, and are very similar to manti, the lamb-filled dumplings eaten in Turkey. <br /> <br />I do make a couple of tweaks that tip my shish barak away from tradition. I fill the dumplings with the lamb sausage mixture that we use at my restaurant Porsena in our anelloni. It's based on merguez, a spicy North African lamb sausage, but the flavor, though slightly different from the classic, still works. In traditional recipes, the filling is already cooked, but here, I leave it raw. And to simplify the sauce mixture, I don’t cook the yogurt, which requires all kinds of thickeners and binders to keep it from curdling. I simply whisk in a little of the hot pasta cooking water to thin the yogurt to a sauce-like consistency and warm it slightly. With the heat of the cooked ravioli and the warm melted butter, it stays perfectly warm.

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