Plov

A few years ago Uzbek cuisine made a surprising but welcome appearance in the US as a startlingly large fraction of Russian restaurants suddenly rebranded to Uzbek or Rus/Uz and changed about half of their menu to foods of that region. Indubitably the dishes are homogenized to post-Soviet palates and then Americanized to use to available ingredients and tools, but they are nonetheless tasty and worth checking out.

A pot o'plov

And perhaps trying to replicate. In particular, the Uzbek version of a pilaf - a hearty, meaty, sweet-accented plov - is relatively easy to produce in home conditions.

As with any dish important to a culture there are many contradictory One True Ways to achieve the optimal result. Our base recipe - and more importantly, the methodology - was adapted from the food blogger Kamelena (who posts in Russian with step pictures.) This specific set of steps was chosen as relatively reflective of a reasonable subset of the "one true ways", least fussy, and not requiring any additional cookware or taking ingredients out and putting them back in.

The overall roadmap is to cook it in stages adding each component to the pot in turn: aromatics, meat, vegetables, seasonings, rice.

Starting list of ingredients as suggested by said blogger (unit-converted and rounded):

• fatty boneless chunks of meat - optimally lamb - 2lb

• rice, long-grain, 3.5 cups

• carrots, 1lb

• onions, um, 2-3 medium to large ones or something

• neutral vegetable oil, 3/4-1 cup

• garlic, 1-3 heads. Not cloves, heads.

• 1 tbsp barberries (or other dried berries)

• 1 tbsp cumin (This is key and what makes the whole thing taste right.)

• 1 non-heaping tsp turmeric

• salt & pepper & other seasonings to taste

• boiling water. (Ok, that's one extra piece of cookware. Electric kettles rule.)

The pot one cooks it in needs to be quite large and also thick-bottomed. The authentic pot to do this in is a cast-iron kazan, but who's got one. English-language recipes tend to recommend dutch ovens, which the Gargoyle also hasn't got, and so to ensure maximum bottom thiccness uses a pressure-cooker without the pressure mode.

American recipes will tell you to make this with beef, and even chicken and pork exist as possible variants. You could, certainly, use any meat so long as it's fatty enough, but the stronger, more savory flavor of the lamb is pretty key to the overall taste. Fat is important, its job is to permeate the rice as it cooks.

The meat should be cut into fairly large chunks - store bought "stew meat" comes out just about perfect. Any larger and you'd be advised to fish it out and cut it before serving. Any smaller and they might disintegrate rather than merely get tender, which on the other hand is also not terrible. Bone-in meat tastes fine but does require that one deal with bones at the eating phase. The meat cooks right off the bones, and it's not pleasant to encounter surprise bones in one's bowl. Some other recipes call for searing the meat separately and adding it later; we're not doing that here.

If you have it, fat of whatever meat you're making is a good substitute for the vegetable oil.

Rice needs to be low starch. In absence of excruciatingly specific Uzbek rices, long-grained ones like basmati or Thai jasmine rice do the job; the basmati also looks right - the jasmine comes out a little paler than expected. The rice should be rinsed until the water runs clear and then left covered in cold water until its turn comes.

In absence of turmeric a combination of ginger for not-quite-right-but-an-extra-note flavor and saffron for color has been attempted; rather less authentic but ain't bad. Other seasonings like peppers, coriander, thyme, cilantro and so forth are not unprecedented, but haven't been tried here.

If you're wondering what the heck are barberries, they are tart red berries which may be available in dried form in ethnic stores. Raisins make a perfectly ok substitute, but use about 3 tbsp of them, because dried barberries are smaller and more of them fit into a tablespoon, and your goal is to have enough of them to spread around the whole vat of food. Craisins or sour cherries may well do the trick. If for some reason one wants fewer of raisins one could possibly chop them more finely. (Why would you, though?)

One can also add chickpeas at the berry phase; haven't tried and can't speak to any pre-prep or proportions.

Some traditional recipes use room-temperature water rather than boiling; one is inclined to trust that the cooking times on this one are calibrated for boiling. Just make sure it's not cold, you don't want to stop the cooking processes.

Carrots are suggested to be chopped into batons; the Gargoyle usually takes a bag of baby carrots and slices them into thin-ish circles because it seems like less work.

The onions... are a thing that Gargoyle is sensitive to and can't stand the taste or smell of, does not allow in the house, and normally just omits. Here, though, rather than just a flavor profile they are a textural component, and so needed to be substituted.

Instructions say to heat about half of the vegetable oil, caramelize the onions and then add the meat and cook the two together. For cooking the meat evenly the vegetable stratum seemed important, so a daikon or a Korean radish was sliced into the thinnest semi-circles possible and used in lieu of the onion for the texture. And then there was a time when daikon required a separate store trip, and a desperate look around the kitchen yielded apples, so those were peeled and sliced into thinnest possible slivers which were then halved, and those worked for a pretty good base layer too. (Note, other sources say to cook the meat first and then the onions, the purpose of that being for some of the fat from the meat to be what you're cooking the onions in).

Garlic was a shoo-in to provide some of the flavor... and then a friend made a recommendation. "If you dislike onions", they said, "have you tried asafoetida? It's a seasoning that has an onion-ish flavor profile, but different enough that you might not hate it."

This magic substance turned out to be available in Indian ethnic stores under the name hing, and it indeed turned out to be Gargoyle-compatible, and is now used along with garlic powder in contexts that call for heating aromatics in oil, that being a key step to making it taste pungent instead of terrible. Hing instructions typically say "a pinch" is the correct quantity. (Warning, it also exists as a nutritional supplement with unconfirmed usefulness including possibly to aid digestion and as a blood-thinner, and it should be fine in cooking-recommended amounts, but read the internets before deciding to add a whole lot more of it. Also some people think it tastes and smells terrible, and it's also called devil's dung. You're welcome.)

So, taking things in order:

• Rinse and soak your rice in cold water

• Chop all the things you're chopping

• Heat up half of your oil

• Add aromatics (garlic, hing, onion or substitute), cook on medium-to-high for 5 minutes or so

• Add the meat, cook for 5 mins or so, stirring

• Add the rest of the oil plus the carrots, cook for 5-10 mins

• Boil some water separately

• Add the barberries/raisins/craisins, cumin, turmeric or other seasonings, salt

• Stir

• Add the boiling water to almost cover the meat.

• On top plop down a whole head of garlic from which you peeled just the outer layer

• Reduce heat, cover, let cook for 30 to 50 minutes (until the meat is soft)

• Trivia: the intermediate product achieved at this point is called zirvak. One can theoretically stop here, refrigerate the results, and reheat them later and continue the recipe. Haven't tried that.

• Boil water some more.

• Drain the rice you've been soaking. Drop rice on top of the rest of stuff, level it, but do not stir. (It is an article of faith that plov is not stirred.)

• Carefully, trying not to disturb the rice, pour more boiling water to top the rice by about an inch.

• Salt, possibly sprinkle more cumin

• Cook without covering for 10-15 minutes on low, so the water largely absorbs into the rice

• Carefully stab down through the rice with the something like the back end of a serving spoon a few times to let steam out. Do not stir.

• Cover, cook for another 15-20 minutes

• Done! Now you can stir, or you can upend the whole thing into an enormous bowl so the meat is on top.

Verdict: this makes an enormous vat of food, so plan to share with lots of friends or make lots of room in the fridge. It reheats really easily in the microwave. You will feast for days.