The Arabi Kitchen · Palestine

Musakhan

مسخّن

Chicken, sumac, and more olive oil than a stranger would think reasonable. The strangers are wrong.

The bread underneath is not a serving suggestion. It is the point.

Musakhan is the dish of the olive harvest — invented, the story goes, to answer one question: how is this year's oil? Onions are collapsed slowly in great quantities of it, stained deep red with sumac; chicken roasts until burnished; and everything lands on taboon bread whose whole job is to drink. By the time it reaches the table the bread is heavy, purple-red, barely structural — and it is the single best thing on the platter. Palestinians will reach past the chicken for it.

It is also, for the diaspora, maybe the most homesick-making smell in the repertoire — sumac and slow onions in olive oil is the scent of a specific hillside in October. We wrote a whole dispatch about it: a town near Ramallah called Deir Dibwan and the New Jersey block where its families kept the dish alive. Musakhan travels because everything it needs fits on a pantry shelf except the chicken.

What is musakhan?

Musakhan is Palestinian roast chicken served over taboon flatbread with a thick layer of onions slow-cooked in olive oil and sumac, topped with toasted pine nuts. Considered Palestine's national dish, it is traditionally made to celebrate the new season's olive oil.

The recipe

Serves 4–6 · about 1 hour 45 minutes, mostly onions being told to be patient

• 1 whole chicken, cut in quarters (or 6 thighs, bone-in)
• 5 large yellow onions, sliced — yes, five
• ¾ cup good olive oil — yes, three-quarters
• 4 tbsp sumac, divided · 1 tsp baharat (seven spice) · salt and black pepper
• Taboon bread, thick pita, or naan · ⅓ cup pine nuts (or slivered almonds), toasted in oil · lemon

1. Rub the chicken with 2 tbsp sumac, the baharat, salt, pepper, and a few spoonfuls of the oil. Rest while the onions work.
2. In a wide pan, pour in the rest of the olive oil and add all the onions with a big pinch of salt. Cook low, stirring occasionally, 30–40 minutes — soft, sweet, collapsed, never browned hard. Stir in the remaining sumac; the whole pan goes brick-red. This is the soul of the dish.
3. Meanwhile roast the chicken at 425°F until burnished and cooked through, 35–45 minutes.
4. Lay the bread on a big platter. Spoon a little of the onion oil straight onto it — the bread's first drink.
5. Pile the sumac onions over the bread, edge to edge. Set the chicken on top and pour over every drop from the roasting pan.
6. Scatter the toasted pine nuts. A squeeze of lemon. Serve while the bread is still drinking, and let people tear rather than cut.

Set This Table

The sumac, the oil, and the bread — the harvest half of musakhan, shipped.

Sumac — the color and the sour$8.49Olive oil 1L — the dish drinks it$29.99The bread that drinks$5.79Zdan 7 Spice Mix 5.5oz$6.99Almonds — the pine-nut understudy$10.99

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