Mansaf
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| Course | Meal |
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| Place of origin | Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia |
| Region or state | Levant and Arabia |
| Main ingredients | lamb, jameed, rice or bulgur, melilotus, shrak bread |
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Mansaf (Arabic: منسف) is a traditional Levantine dish made of lamb cooked in a sauce of fermented dried yogurt and served with rice or bulgur.
It is the national dish of Jordan, and can also be found in Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The name of the dish comes from the term "large tray" or "large dish".
The original pastoralist Bedouin mansaf underwent significant changes in the 20th century. The dish is said to originally have been made with simply meat (camel or lamb), meat broth or ghee (clarified butter) and bread. Following the popularization of rice in northern Jordan in the 1920s, rice gradually was introduced into the dish, at first mixed with bulgur, and later on its own, until the dish reached its modern incarnation of being based on white rice. Similarly, the jamid sauce is a recent development, as the Bedouins did not historically feature jamid in their cooked dishes until their modern sedentarization.
Jameed is a hard dry yogurt that is prepared by the boiling of sheep or goat's milk, which is then left to dry and ferment. The mixture is later kept in a fine woven cheesecloth to make a thick yogurt. Salt is added daily to thicken the yogurt even more for a few days, which then becomes very dense and is shaped into round balls. Al-Karak city in Jordan has a reputation for producing the highest quality of jameed.
A jameed broth is then prepared and the pieces of lamb are cooked in it. The dish is served on a large platter with a layer of flatbread (markook or shrak) topped with rice and then the meat, garnished with almonds and pine nuts, and then the creamy jameed sauce poured over all.
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Wikipedia