Uzbek pilaf: step by step photo recipe, nuances, secrets

Pilaf… Just say this word – slowly, in a singsong voice, with gusto. Isn’t it true that the nose immediately feels the aromas of oriental spices, suddenly you want to swallow, and somewhere under the spoon a sweet languor is born – a foretaste of the amazing, unlike anything taste of this delicious dish? So what to expect? Let’s run for groceries and learn how to cook real pilaf in the Uzbek style!

Pilaf cooked according to the classic recipe is long, interesting, inexpensive and delicious, in general, everything I like. The recipe allows for a huge number of variations – I cooked pilaf dozens of times – in nature and in tiny unequipped kitchens, with an excess of all kinds of ingredients and their almost complete absence, according to the classics and experimental methods – only once the dish turned out not very tasty, in other cases it is a win-win food for a holiday, a friendly drinking party, a snack on a sortie, for every day. The most important thing is to understand the basic principles of cooking pilaf, and then everything will go like clockwork, or rather, oil, fat, meat, vegetables, spices and rice!

How to cook Uzbek pilaf? Basic principles and secrets

Of course, you have tried a variety of pilafs in various versions many times. I still remember with pain the pilaf that my mother made. Do not think, she is a wonderful woman and very good at cooking, but this dish was clearly not her strong point – dense, seized, faded in taste rice porridge, in which in some places there were small pieces of overdried meat and pale carrots, plus a couple of unfortunate peas black pepper and a lone lavrushka. Almost all pilafs cooked at home, which I tried in the future, were a variation of this porridge, with some deviations.

What’s the matter? Are the products wrong? Maybe pilaf can only be made on a fire? Or maybe only men should cook it? What nonsense! It’s just a matter of neglecting the main principles and the wrong approach to cooking! And no, even the most detailed and step-by-step photo recipe of Uzbek pilaf will reveal these secrets to you. So read carefully – I’ll tell you everything, only shh – no one!

At the end of the XNUMXth century, the French monarch sent a delegation to the Turkish court, where the ambassadors were fed plov. The French were delighted with the exotic dish, and described its composition to the royal chefs, who tried to repeat the dish. The result was the same tasteless rice porridge with meat, called miroton – rice was boiled in milk and cream “for fat”, dyed with egg yolks, and the meat was boiled and then fried in butter. Now myroton, fortunately, has disappeared, and the word itself sometimes denotes “fake” dishes prepared from the same products as the original, but ignoring the original principles and regional customs.

So, here are the things that distinguish real pilaf from rice porridge, carrot stew or whatever.

• Pilaf is a stew dish, this is the first and most important principle! The most important thing is not to boil the rice, but to stew it, that is, to cook it in a small amount of water, with meat and vegetable broth and fat, then it will be crumbly, saturated and tasty!
• Pilaf is a puff dish, it is mixed just before serving! Bottom – meat and onions, in the middle – carrots, garlic, spices, dried fruits and fruits, top – rice and again garlic. In this sequence, the products are prepared and laid, in the same and remain until the very end of cooking!
• Don’t be greedy! Meat – in large pieces, grain – of the highest quality, onions, spices, garlic and especially carrots – more, with additional ingredients – experiment, do not spare time and effort – it will reward you a hundredfold!

• Follow the cooking recipe, but don’t get hung up on the same foods. I believe that pilaf cannot be cooked without three things – carrots, garlic and cumin. The bottom layer – meat – is not necessarily lamb, it can be veal, beef, turkey, chicken, and even – let the Uzbeks forgive me! – pork, fish and seafood, mushrooms, as well as sausages, minced meat wrapped in leaves like dolma and other semi-finished products. Rice is also not a dogma. Bulgur and pearl barley, pshonka, even pasta feel great in pilaf, I personally cooked pilaf from buckwheat and chicken backs in my hungry student years – and it was delicious!

So, pilaf is not a classic kharcho, in which the composition and ratio of products is important. Pilaf is a way of cooking dishes from cereals, meat and vegetables, which means that it is always an experiment, creativity, a way to reveal your secret talents, to surprise and surprise!

Is it possible to make classic pilaf at home?

With the history of this dish, everything is the same as with a big party, to which someone invited a non-drinking Uzbek – where the pilaf came from is unknown, but it exists. In the Middle East, plov has existed since the third or second century BC – that is, since rice began to be grown there. But in China, rice and saffron, with which it was tinted, are known even earlier, and in India, from ancient times, a similar dish was prepared from whole grains of wheat.

One way or another, pilaf came to us from the Far East – the Persians added meat to it, and the ancestors of modern Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens brought the recipe to perfection and turned pilaf into what is meant by it now. By the way, in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, pilaf is made differently – there rice and zirvak (garum) are cooked separately. They say this method is more ancient, but in my opinion it is not so interesting – well, why eat just rice tinted with turmeric and eat it all with meat in sauce, when all these ingredients together are asking for a cauldron? It is not surprising that it is the Central Asian, Uzbek pilaf that is more popular in the world and it is not for nothing that it is included in the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List – I don’t want to offend anyone, but it tastes better!

And finally – they say, it is impossible to make pilaf at home, in an ordinary kitchen, they say – how to cook Uzbek pilaf without smoke? From experience I will say that pilaf in nature, in a large cauldron, and in a good company, really turns out to be tastier. Maybe the temperature regime affects (after all, this dish needs the strongest possible fire at the beginning of cooking!), Maybe the aroma of smoke, or maybe the hunger of the tasters, usually played out in the fresh air, who knows? However, this is not a reason not to cook pilaf at home! Yes, a little less authentic. But we are not ancient Persian warriors either! Pilaf, like history itself, is constantly changing, but in any conditions it retains its special charm!

How to cook Uzbek pilaf – choose products

Any step-by-step photo recipe of a real Uzbek pilaf contains a photo with the initial set of products. But we have already agreed that the ingredients in this dish can be changed in fact as you please! Therefore, we will try to cover them all, if possible, breaking them into main categories.

1. Vegetables

The main vegetables in pilaf are carrots and garlic, onions are also important. It is better to take carrots sweet, fragrant, with a bright color – red or yellow. It is cut exclusively into cubes – so that it does not burn and retains the taste during the stewing process. To match her, the onion is also cut – in rings or half rings, about 3-4 mm thick. Almost any garlic will do, the main thing is more. Of the additional vegetables – fresh hot peppers (according to the season), also in the process of stewing, you can throw parsley roots, parsnips, horseradish, celery into zirvak – a little.

2. Fat

In all Central Asian pilaf recipes, you can find such an ingredient as fat tail fat. It’s fat from, um… the very back of special fat-tailed sheep. It is distinguished by its special tenderness, fusibility and lack of smell, and at room temperature it does not freeze in ghee form. But I personally haven’t seen it on sale in my eyes and I doubt that it greatly outperforms our pork fat. If you use very fatty meat, you can cut pieces of fat directly from it. The best basis for pilaf is a mixture of animal and vegetable fats – best of all with cottonseed oil, common in Uzbekistan, but also with sunflower or corn oil. Unrefined oil must be calcined to remove impurities – I will tell you how to do this directly in the recipe.

3. Spices and additives

Well, with zira – she is cumin – everything is clear, we put it in, and we put it generously. For example, dried barberry. Well, red hot peppers. Oh yes, turmeric. Is that all? No matter how! A huge number of spices harmonize with pilaf, in addition to those mentioned – coriander, suneli hops, black and white peppers, a little thyme, dried basil (just a little!), paprika, saffron and many others. The main thing is that it is zira that dominates in the bouquet. If you doubt that you can properly dispose of spices – buy a mixture, but I ask you, not in the market, but from the Uzbeks in the market!

In addition to spices, other additives are added to pilaf, the most famous of which is raisins. The goal is to give the finished dish a little extra sweetness and sourness that nicely sets off the overall taste. Any dried fruit will do – dried apricots, apricots, dried cherries and cranberries, dogwood, even figs, sometimes they add! You can also use fresh fruits and berries in small quantities – plums and cherry plums, thorns, fresh dogwood and barberry. An excellent pilaf is obtained with pieces of quince – very unusual, but delicious!

4. Meat

Finally! Of course, pilaf is also made with fish and marine reptiles, vegans add seitan, mushrooms, and legumes to zirvak. But these are already several other recipes, but we will talk exclusively about meat pilaf. We need any moderately fatty and not sinewy meat – lamb, pork or beef neck, rump, ham, poultry meat (except breast), you can also try adding offal – heart, lungs, liver (with liver, for example, they make their own version of pilaf – Bakhsh – Bukharian Jews). If you throw some bones into the zirvak, it will be more rich. The chicken can be thrown right along with the bones. The meat must be coarsely chopped – no less than a matchbox, so it is guaranteed to be juicy inside.

5. Grain

As already mentioned, it is not necessary to use rice. An excellent pilaf is obtained with bulgur, barley is a good option, any grain that cooks relatively quickly, absorbs the broth well and does not stick together during cooking will do. Also, other cereals and legumes are often added to rice – for example, chickpeas, mung beans, peas and beans, mixtures of various cereals are used.

The best rice is Central Asian (usually sold on the market by the same Uzbeks as spices), for example, devzira, scald, alanga, kenja, Thai varieties are worse – basmati or jasmine, varieties are not suitable for risotto at all. If we don’t bother with the names, we need rice containing as little starch as possible – so as not to stick together, long – for beauty, and whole. You can identify low-starch rice by its color – it should be transparent, not white. If there are no other options, you can take any rice, but rinse it several times in running cold water.

Real Uzbek pilaf – step by step recipe with photo

Phew! I have already written so much and just got to the actual recipe. I hope all this is not in vain. So, let’s consider the preparation of pilaf using the example of ordinary, classic products for our latitudes.

• Rice – 600 g (more possible);
• Veal pulp – 600 g;
• Sunflower oil – 125-175 g;
• Pork fat – 150 g;
• Carrots – at least 600 g;
• Onion – half a kilo (3 medium);
• Garlic – 3 medium heads;
• A small hot pepper;
• Zira – 2 teaspoons;
• Dried barberry – a handful;
• Raisins, dried cranberries – a handful;
• Saffron, turmeric, paprika or a mixture of them – 2 tsp;
• Coriander, black pepper, ground cardamom, salt – to taste.

Of the equipment – a thick-walled saucepan, ducklings, a bowler hat, ideally a cauldron. Any iron, cast iron, aluminum dish will do – the main thing is that the walls are thick, so the heat will be distributed evenly. It is not advised to cook pilaf in enameled dishes.

1. To begin with, we take rice, pour it into a saucepan and put cold water under the current thin stream. Rinse, occasionally stirring the rice with your hand or even rubbing it with your palms, until the water is completely clear. This can take an hour or more, depending on the quality of the cereal used, but it must be rid of excess starch, otherwise the pilaf will be sticky.
2. We take the oil, pour it into a heated cauldron. Pour finely chopped lard or fat trimmed from meat there. We fry until the pieces turn into cracklings – we take them out with a slotted spoon and continue heating until the smoke stops coming from the fat. Any unrefined fat should be calcined in the same way. It’s easy to check readiness – if you throw a couple of grains of salt into the oil, it will “shoot”.
3. We cut the meat into large pieces, best of all – from half a cigarette pack. We place it in boiling oil so that at least a couple of centimeters of space remains between the pieces – otherwise the meat will begin to give juice. Fry over high heat until golden brown on all sides. If the area of ​​​​the bottom of your saucepan does not allow you to fry all the meat at once in this way, we do it in portions, putting the finished pieces on a plate.

There is no suitable cauldron for frying? You can do everything separately – heat the oil in a pan, fry the meat, onions and carrots in it in turn, then move everything to a suitable saucepan. Then cook according to the recipe. You can always get out, the main thing is desire!

4. We cut large onions into half rings, medium and small – into rings, 2-3 mm thick, fry it in fat until golden brown. It is better to cook the onion separately from the meat so that it does not burn, and the veal does not let the juice out.
5. Carrots are cut into cubes 4-6 mm thick. The thickness depends on how tough your meat is and how long it takes to stew – the longer, the thicker. Carrots can be fried, or you can throw them into a cauldron right raw – as you like. If frying, then a little and separately, so that it forms a separate layer on top of the meat with onions.

6. With a generous hand, we throw spices, spices, dried fruits, additives and salt, two whole heads of garlic, whole red pepper into the pot, lower the heat and add a little water so that it covers the bottom and our whole mass stops frying. At this point, the zirvak needs to be salted – after all, there will be a lot of rice in the dish, which will absorb the salt.

What to do next depends on what kind of meat you are using. If it is veal or beef, tough parts of lamb or pork, poultry – you need to pour meat with vegetables and spices with water, cover with a lid and simmer until tender – the recipe for making a classic pilaf allows you to stew zirvak for up to 2-3 hours. If it is a tender pork neck, chicken, lamb tenderloin, then zirvak can be immediately covered with rice – it will be stewed while the rice is being prepared.

7. We spread the washed rice in an even layer on the surface of the future pilaf, level it with a spatula. Top with cold water – about 2 centimeters, the amount of water depends on the type of grain and how long it has been in the water, if anything – then you can add a little water to the dish. We close the cauldron with a lid. After boiling, the fire can be reduced to a minimum.

8. During cooking, it is sometimes necessary to look into the upcoming pilaf. If the rice has already absorbed all the water, but still remains raw – several grooves are made in the pilaf with a wooden stick, a knife or a spoon handle – the broth and oil will circulate through them in the rice, soaking the grain. It is in such grooves that water should be added, through which the dish is added if necessary. You can add water to pilaf no more than 2-3 times.

9. 10-15 minutes before cooking, you need to poke a dozen or one and a half peeled garlic cloves into the surface of the pilaf – they turn out to be very tasty and additionally flavor the rice.
10. The fire must be turned off when there is no more water in the pilaf, ideally the rice should be just a little undercooked. After that, the cauldron must be sure to stand under the lid for 15-20 minutes – to relax, cool down and “upret”.

Here it is, the recipe for a real Uzbek pilaf – step by step and with a photo, it all doesn’t look so scary. You can serve pilaf either by stirring it and sprinkling it with herbs, or by pouring layers on a large dish in reverse order – rice from below, then carrots, then meat, and beautiful heads of zirvak stewed garlic on top. It is customary to eat this dish with unleavened cakes, vegetables, herbs, usually washed down with tea or ayran. And the “Rum Diary” will recommend spicy tinctures prepared by oneself for pilaf – for example, coriander, «hunting», Stark, and as a digestif – liqueurs from basil, cilantro or barberry! Eat tasty, drink in moderation and be healthy!

The article uses information from the books “Uzbek Pilaf” by Karim Makhmudov, “Culinary Dictionary”, “National Cuisines of Our Nations” by V.V. Pokhlebkin, a dozen culinary sites of varying degrees of scall, TV show “Spice” and other sources.