Dizi became one of our favourite quick-and-easy lunch dishes during our travels, and we would actively seek out specialist restaurants, with their large ovens full of neat rows of individual stoneware dizi pots.
It’s a simple enough idea: small chunks of meaton- the-bone are simmered slowly over several hours with potato, tomatoes, beans and a piece of lamb tail fat, which releases an unctuous richness during the cooking. To serve, the broth is poured into a bowl onto pieces of flatbread and slurped up with a squeeze of sour orange or lemon. The bone is then fished out of the dizi pot and discarded, and the remaining meat, fat and vegetables are pounded to a coarse paste using a special dizi pestle. This tasty mush (for want of a better word) is eaten with plenty more flatbread, pickles, onion, sour orange (or any citrus, really) and fresh herbs (try tarragon, mint and basil). It’s far from refined, but unspeakably delicious.
This version omits the scary lamb tail fat to suit Western palates and health concerns, and it is probably a tad more spiced than authentic dizi. The longer you can simmer the lamb, the better the result.