Homemade Harissa That Will Transform Your Cooking! #harissa #recipe

“Harissa is a hot chili pepper paste, native to the Maghreb. The main ingredients are roasted red peppers, Baklouti peppers, spices and herbs such as garlic paste, caraway seeds, coriander seeds, cumin and olive oil to carry the oil-soluble flavors.” – Wikipedia

This is an easy homemade harissa recipe that uses red pimentos to give a local twist to this delicious Northern African condiment.

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Harissa Paste

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Mhm. [Music] So, haresa is something I’ve been hearing about and seeing for quite some time. You know, watching cooking shows online and that kind of thing. I usually, you know, see harissa being used in different types of applications. It’s only recently that I actually tried the paste myself in terms of eating it and it is very delicious, very flavorful. So, I wanted to make my own paste. Um, it is a specialty item. So, I’ve seen it once or twice in special groceries or these specialty groceries and it could be kind of expensive. So, I decided, you know what, I want to make it myself. Now, it traditionally calls for red chilies. And sometimes you do get red chilies here in the market, but you don’t often get them. It’s not, you know, something that easily accessible. So, instead of using red chilies, I using red pimentos. Now, there’s the beauty about going in the market, right? when they go in the market, I could go and go by the pimento man by Hmon and actually choose out only red pimentos. You see have the green and the orange and sometimes even yellow. But because you know harissa is a red paste, you want to use red pimentos for this. Now again this is not traditional. They would traditionally use chilies but I using pmentotos and we all know um pmentotos don’t have no heat or no set of heat. It’s more for flavor. So to get the heat or to bring the heat, I using two uh Scotch bonnet peppers. Actually, this is looking like a little scorpionish. A little tail here. Yeah, I figured this could be a scorpion or a hybrid. Now, I’m not making it too spicy. So, I’m not using the seeds and that kind of thing. I’m just using the outside of it. Um because I want it to be more flavorful than spicy. So, here is it. We have um some other ingredients here. paprika, some coriander seeds, chera, onion, garlic. Yeah, it’s a real nice thing. Easy to put together. So, let me jump into it. All right. So, to prep the pimentos, I just cutting the tops off. And I’m not going to cut these into smaller pieces because eventually we need to grind the paste or grind the ingredients into a paste. So no need to cut these into smaller pieces. We could, you know, cook it just like this. So I just taking the tops off. And if you wanted to, you could roast these fermentotos to get a more smoky flavor into your harissa paste. It’s totally optional, but I wouldn’t be doing that today. All right. And for the pepper, just going to cut around like this. Again, not using the seeds or the membrane for more flavor than heat. And I think I only want to use one of the peppers cuz I feel like if I use the two, it’ll be too spicy. So, I mean, how spicy you make this is, you know, totally up to your preference, however spicy you want it. But I was going to use the two peppers, but I feel good with one. So, let’s air on the side of caution and just go with one hot pepper. Now, I want to go in with three small uh purple onions. People just call these red onions. I don’t know why cuz do look red to me. Uh if you have um some bigger ones, you could use like one or two, but because these are small, I’m going to use three of them. And if you know me, I am from the school of you could never have too much garlic in a recipe. So I using about 12 cloves here. So I want to toast off my spices. Going in with the coriander seeds and some jeera. So, you’re going to let this toast for a couple seconds, probably about 30 seconds to 45. You don’t want it to burn at all. So, as soon as it starts to smoke, go fragrant, and pop, you want to turn up your heat. And nice it right there. Good to go. Right. So, you just want to grind it in the mortan pestle. Just going to grind this up. And that’s going to release all the oils from the spices. If you could smell in here right now. Very good. Our jeera or cumin and coriander seeds toasted and ground. Smelling red. All right, let move on to the next step. We have our flame on medium heat. A medium flame. Just going to add some oil. So, I’m going to go in with my onions first. And we’re going to saute these onions for a while, probably like a minute and a half, till they start to go translucent because I want to kind of bring out the sweetness in the onion. And the sweetness from the onion is going to add as a nice counterbalance to the acidity of the tomato paste when we add it. All right. So, the onions have been going for almost 2 minutes now. And as you could see here, they have gone translucent. And for me, this is a good point to start introducing the other ingredients because I don’t need it to go further than this. If you wanted to, you could sweat this for even longer and as it caramelizes further, it’ll get even more sweet. But like I said, I just want a hint of sweetness to mellow out the tomato paste. I don’t want it to be a overly sweet harissa paste. Now, I’m going to add my pimentos and the hot pepper. Added my garlic as well. Add in the toasted coriander seeds and jeera. Add in two tablespoons of paprika. Now I’m going to add my tomato paste. I added about a half a cup of water to the container that the uh tomato piece was in. I just want to add that in. Adding a pinch of salt. I don’t want to add too much salt at this point because we could always adjust for salt later. So, we’re going to cover this and I’m going to cook this until the pmentotos get soft. And that should take about 25 minutes or so, give or take. So, we’ll check back on it in about 25 minutes and see how we going. All right, 25 minutes later. Looking good. The tomato paste has infused with all the other flavors. So, I just want to switch off my heat now. All right. So, at this stage, I want to go in with my immersion blender and we’re going to blend it into a paste. Now, if you don’t have immersion blender, you could put this in your food processor or a regular blender and blend it up. It’s fine. Now, the only thing with using a immersion blender rather than a food processor, regular blender, is that you have to check and make sure that all the peppers are, you know, blended. You wouldn’t have to guess if you’re using like a food processor or something, but I was feeling a little lazy. I didn’t want to go and wash up all them and things. So, that is why I opted to use the immersion blender. Last thing I want to do is finish off with a teaspoon of lime juice. Stir that in. And that’s it. Our harissa paste is done. But you see how simple that was to bring together. This has go real good with like chicken. You make like harissa chicken. I had it with Shak Shuka and it tasted real good. I mean recently I saw Sean Grande aka what’s in the pot do a harissa lamb. So I think that’s something even I want to try. This harissa paste is something real versatile. So, I really hope you try this harissa paste because it real flavorful. Is the kind of thing that I think once you start to use in your dishes, you’ll want to continue to use. Again, you could use this to flavor up a chicken, fish, pork, beef, lamb, whatever. Trust and believe this is definitely something you want to have in your arsenal. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up, give it a share. If you want a link to the full recipe, I’ll have that in the video description. So, look out for that. If you’re not subscribed to the channel, please take a moment to do so. And of course, as always, thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one. I might do a harissa chicken or something in a follow-up episode. Who knows? Maybe, maybe not. Look out for it or not. We’ll see. But yeah, thanks for watching. Mhm. Hm.