Jasha maru is what a Bhutanese kitchen cooks when it wants warmth without a fight. Chicken is simmered rather than fried, and the sauce builds itself from tomato, onion and a great deal of ginger, thinned to something between a stew and a broth so it soaks into red rice. Ginger does the work that chilli does elsewhere in this pantry, which makes the dish the gentlest thing on a Bhutanese table and the one most often set in front of a guest who has not grown up eating ema. Coriander goes in by the fistful at the end, and a pinch of thingay, the wild Sichuan pepper that grows in the forests here, gives it the cold citrus tingle that marks the food of these valleys.
Zone: Tibetan Sphere
INGREDIENTS
- 800 g bone-in chicken thighs (each cut through into two pieces)
- 2 medium tomatoes (chopped)
- 1 medium onion (sliced)
- 1 leek (sliced into rounds)
- 50 g ginger (half sliced and half grated)
- 6 garlic cloves (sliced)
- 4 green chillies (slit)
- 2 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp turmeric
- ½ tsp Sichuan peppercorns (crushed)
- 500 ml water
- a large handful of coriander (roughly chopped)
METHOD
- Put the chicken in a pot with the water, tomatoes, the sliced ginger, half the garlic and the salt. Bring to a boil, skim, then simmer covered for 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the onion, leek and remaining garlic over a medium heat for 8 minutes, until soft and just starting to colour.
- Tip the onion and leek into the chicken pot along with the turmeric and the green chillies. Simmer uncovered for 10 minutes, pressing the tomato against the side of the pot to break it down into the sauce.
- Stir in the grated ginger and cook for a final 5 minutes. The sauce should be loose and slightly thickened, not reduced to a paste.
- Take off the heat, scatter over the crushed Sichuan peppercorns and the coriander, and serve with red rice.
NOTES
UK adaptation: Chicken thighs on the bone give far more flavour than breast and will not dry out in the simmer. Thingay is Bhutanese wild Sichuan pepper; use Sichuan peppercorns from a Chinese grocer, crushed and added at the end so the tingle survives. Leeks are correct here and are not a substitute for onion, so use both. Everything else widely available.
US adaptation: Bone-in chicken thighs from any supermarket. Sichuan peppercorns from an Asian grocery or online, crushed and added off the heat. Everything else widely available.
Cook’s note: Ginger is the flavour of this dish, not a background note, so weigh it rather than guessing and add it in two stages, half into the simmer and half in the final five minutes. Keep the sauce loose enough to pool around the rice.