Lamb Margog

Margog is a true family dish from the Najd region of Saudi Arabia, cooked in enormous pots for gatherings and feast days. It is a rich lamb and vegetable stew, but its signature is the dough: small rounds or strips of simple flatbread dough are laid over the top of the stew in the last minutes of cooking, where they steam into soft, chewy discs that soak up the broth. Everyone gets one with their portion, which is the whole joy of the dish.

Stew with a dough blanket

The stew itself is deep and warming, with tender lamb, sweet pumpkin, and zucchini in a tomato broth spiced with cumin and turmeric. The dough pieces are soft and slightly puffy, catching the broth like a dumpling and tasting faintly of the meat they cooked above. It is rib-sticking, generous food, best shared with a crowd and plenty of flatbread. Every spoonful of the broth tastes of the pumpkin that melted into it.

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