It’s a humid afternoon and minutes before the sun is due to melt over a Middle Eastern valley in the ancient, rural Jordanian village of Dana.
I rush down a series of sandstone steps, cross a party of lambs nibbling on grass nearby, and stumble over an uneven cobble-stone path, in my quest to make it to the mountain edge lookout on time. As I pace furiously through the city of calm, a lane to nowhere opens up on my left. And in the middle of the lane, blocked off by a wall, is a huge hole in the ground.
Three local men, crouching to their feet, gather around the hole. I’m so amused by the seriousness at which they stare at this big earth circle that I stop and ask the group what they’re doing, hoping that someone responds in English. One of the men replies: “We’re cooking barbecue. Zarb”.
Zarb, I discover, is a traditional barbeque of Bedouin tribes, the Arabian Peninsula’s Indigenous peoples, many of whom live in Jordan.
The men switch their attention from me, the tourist, to the fascinating hole in the ground and the culinary task at hand. Their mission is to quickly light a fire to heat the coal required for their underground barbeque before the night curtain falls.
I leave them to their culinary expedition, take off to watch the sun set nearby and later return to see the men still at it, continuing their outdoor cooking crusade in their makeshift hole.
With a fire lit, they get their coal burning, and then place a cylindrical metal cage – containing layers of chicken, local lamb (tonight’s dinner is probably related to the tribe of sheep I passed earlier) and vegetables – down the hole and into the depths of the earth.
This cooking method is ancient and seems almost ceremonial. There’s no light except for the fire’s flames and my iPhone torch. There’s no noise except for the scratchings of the men’s movements against the floor and cries of the town’s animals: it’s as though they know they could end up under ground as zarb fodder one day soon. And now, there’s no conversation. All there is a hole, fire, the earth and traditional cooking.
My translator – a Jordanian national – later explains the culinary history behind the earth barbecue to me. She says that as desert-dwelling nomads, Bedouins have always cooked their food in earth ovens because the method requires nothing more than the ingredients, a wrap of some sort to protect the food underground (a metal cage, foil or palm leaves) and the ground itself.
I continue to observe the men build a barbecue. They seal the hole with wet clay, which dries with the heat of the fire, and a huge boulder. The cooking formally begins.
I’m told to return in a few hours to see the men smash through the barbecue’s insulated roof, raise the metal food cage from the earth and dish out the food.
Unfortunately, I return but miss the barbeque smashing.
Determined to taste the cultural delicacy, I partake in a Bedouin BBQ experience in Wadi Rum a few days later.
It’s here, in this desert region, where local Bedouins make their money from teaching tourists about their nomadic and culinary culture.
I join a group of Arabic and American tourists to watch a staged smashing of the earth oven. It’s dark, there are no lights except those which light the stairs up the mountain behind me. Again, the atmosphere falls silent as the group stares at the hole and the men charged with smashing the earth open. With a lot of muscle, the men open the underground oven and lift the food cage up to eye level. And there it is, being waved around before the adoring crowd as though it was a newborn: local, marinated chicken and lamb with vegetables – tender and piping hot, cooking on coals in the deep earth, ready to serve. The meats and vegetables (eggplant, capsicum, potatoes, onions) are presented in the form of a buffet.
Tonight’s head barbecuing chef tells me about his chosen marinade. “For zarb, you can cook lamb,” he says. “You use black pepper, salt and tomato sauce. And you bring coal, you heat the coal until it starts glowing and then you put the meat on nets and put it inside the hole.
“You cover it so it doesn’t leak. It stays or two and a half hours in this way. This is how you do it.”
My translator adds that the chef’s method is pretty stock standard across all regions of Jordan: anyone who wants to DIY a Bedouin barbecue in Australia should just dig a large hole in the ground, insert a metal oven casing containing food in the hole, and case the oven’s edges with sand or clay.
Cooking time will depend on the outdoor conditions, the quantity and quality of the food being cooked and the shape or size of the earth oven. However, in general, the process should take between two and five hours. Including chicken in the barbecue may reduce the cooking time.
On my return from the buffet table to the dining seat, my fellow travellers and I dig into our meals to sample the barbecued meats I’d been waiting to try.
BBQ in Wadi Rum: Some of the equipment may be modern, but pit cooking is a long-time tradition. Source: Yasmin Noone
As our mouths fill with food and heads bow down to stare at the earth’s produce on our plates, the room rings with a concentrated pause, a silence broken only by the sounds of consumption.
The lamb is delectable and soft, earthy, slightly charred, and full of simple but tangy Arabic flavours.
Soon, after dishes of eggplant, capsicum and fattoush are devoured, my initiation into this Bedouin fare, staged across two parts of Jordan, is finally complete.
I think back to those local cooks in Dana who I first saw staring down an empty hole. It’s only now that I finally understand the force that gathers people to stand around and stare at a barbecue. And of course, I now appreciate what those men in Dana were so busy staring at – it was the beauty and power of that mighty cooking hole in the earth.
