Matbucha with Kombu Dashi: a Cooked Mezze Dip

Almost everything else on our mezze board is made cold and fast. Chickpeas blitzed with tahini. Smoked eggplant blitzed with sesame sauce. Roe whipped until it turns pale. The matbucha is the outlier: it spends a long time on a burner before anybody sees it, and the cooking is not a step towards the dish, it is the dish.

The menu line is four things: stewed roma tomatoes & peppers, browned butter, kombu dashi, nori. Two of those belong to North Africa and two of them do not, which is the usual arrangement around here.

What matbucha is

Matbucha is a Maghrebi cooked salad — tomatoes and peppers taken down slowly with garlic and chilli until they lose their shape entirely. The name comes from the Arabic for cooked, which tells you where the emphasis sits. It is a fixture of Moroccan tables, it travelled with Moroccan Jewish families into Israeli cooking, and in both places it usually arrives cool, in a small dish, as one of several salads put down at once for people to work through with bread.

It is not shakshuka, and the confusion is common enough to be worth a sentence. Shakshuka is eggs poached in a tomato and pepper base. Matbucha is the base itself, cooked further, with nothing poached in it. If you have eaten one you have eaten most of the other.

A dip that is cooked is a different animal

A blitzed dip gets its texture from an emulsion. You are suspending fat in something and the machine does the work in ninety seconds. Our hummus is built that way, and so, after the fire has done its part, is the babaganoush.

A stewed dip gets its texture from evaporation, and the only ingredient that produces it is time. A roma tomato is mostly water. Cook it long enough and most of that water leaves the pan, which means everything that was dissolved in it — sugar, acid, glutamate — ends up in a smaller volume than it started in. That is the whole mechanism. Nothing is added to make matbucha taste more of tomato. Something is taken away.

Roma is the right tomato for it precisely because it is the least watery of the common varieties and has more flesh per fruit. The peppers do the same thing on a slower clock, going from crunchy and vegetal to soft and almost sweet.

Browned butter instead of olive oil

The Maghrebi original is an olive oil dish, generously so. Ours is finished with browned butter, and that is a deliberate departure rather than a substitution of convenience.

Browning butter is the same trick as browning anything else. Butter is roughly a fifth water and a small percentage milk solids. Heat it and the water boils off first; keep going and the solids left behind toast in the remaining fat and turn nutty, biscuity, faintly caramel. The French call it beurre noisette — hazelnut butter — and the name is a fair description of what it smells like at the moment it is ready.

What that gives a tomato stew is a roasted note the vegetables cannot produce on their own. Tomatoes concentrate; they do not toast. The butter arrives carrying exactly the flavour the pot is missing, and dairy fat coats the tongue for longer than olive oil does, which matters for something you are eating in small amounts on bread.

The Japanese half is a kelp stock

Kombu dashi is the plainest stock in Japanese cooking: kelp, water, and restraint. The kombu is steeped rather than boiled hard, because boiling it aggressively pulls out slime and bitterness along with the good part. What you are extracting is free glutamate, which is the compound behind savouriness — the taste isolated from kombu by the chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1908 and named umami.

Here is why it belongs in this particular pot rather than being a fusion flourish. Tomatoes are one of the very few plants with a high level of free glutamate of their own; it is a large part of why tomato makes so many things taste more like themselves. Kombu is not introducing a foreign idea to a tomato stew. It is doubling down on the one the tomato already had, and it does it without a meat stock, which would have taken the dish somewhere heavier and further from its origins.

This is the same logic as the sesame sauce we put on other things: pick the Japanese ingredient that reinforces what the Middle Eastern dish was already doing, rather than the one that announces itself loudest.

Nori on top

Nori is seaweed dried and pressed into sheets, then usually toasted. It is marine, faintly sweet, and structurally very thin — which is the point of putting it on a wet dip. It holds its crispness for a moment and then surrenders to the moisture, and by then it has done its job of putting a toasted, sea-air note across the top of a warm tomato spread.

It also tells you what you are about to eat before you taste it. A bowl of red stewed vegetables reads as one thing on a table. A bowl of red stewed vegetables under black seaweed reads as a question, which is closer to accurate.

What it does on the board

Order four dips and you will notice the board is mostly rich. Sesame is rich. Chickpeas are dense. Labne is cool and lactic and cuts a little, but it is still dairy. Nothing there is properly acidic.

Matbucha is the acid, and it is the only thing on the board that arrives warm. Both of those change how the rest of the table tastes. It is the dip we would tell you to put next to the heavy ones rather than the one to order on its own — the same way the edamame and the sprouts exist to keep a table from going one-note.

Vegetarian, vegan, and what to ask

There is no meat in matbucha, and there is none in ours. Kombu dashi is a kelp stock — kombu on its own, not the kelp-and-bonito version — so the savoury depth here is not coming from fish.

It is not vegan, though: browned butter is dairy and it is not an optional garnish, it is one of the four things on the line. If any of that matters at your table, say so when you sit down rather than reading it off a menu photo. Our menu carries its own line asking about dietary restrictions and allergies, and we would rather answer the question than have you guess at it. There is more of this sort of thing in our FAQ.

How to order it

Get pita. Matbucha is a scooping dish and a fork does it no favours.

Order it with at least one of the cold dips rather than alone — the temperature difference across the board is half the pleasure, and it disappears if everything on the table is the same warmth. And eat it early. It is at its best while it still has heat in it, which is a shorter window than you would think for something that spent that long in a pot.

One thing worth knowing if you have eaten at our Haji Lane sibling: Li’l Habibi does not run matbucha. Its board answers the pepper question differently, with a roasted pepper dish built on smoked shimeji and sheep’s feta. Same family, different plate, and worth ordering on its own terms if you are down there — 55 Haji Lane, Singapore 189248, Tuesday to Sunday from 5.30pm.

Where to eat it

The version described here is the Hamilton Road one. We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar — Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. The full mezze list is on the menu, there are pictures of the room and the fire in the gallery, and if you want the longer story of how the restaurant got here, it is in five years of Habibi-san.

If you want to start a meal with a board of these, book a table and tell us it is a mezze night.

More from the same board: Habibi’s spanakopita, the one pastry item among all the dips, and the Atlantic seabass if the mezze is only the start of the evening.