Uzbek & the Silk Road · Main
Qovurma Palov
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, a warm current of chile, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 600 g devzira or medium grain rice, rinsed until the water runs clear then soaked 1 hour in warm salted water
- 800 g lamb shoulder, in 4 cm pieces
- 120 g lamb tail fat, diced
- 120 ml sunflower or cottonseed oil
- 700 g carrots, cut into 5 mm batons by hand
- 300 g onions, sliced thin
- 1 whole head of garlic, unpeeled, root trimmed
- 2 tsp cumin seed, crushed between the palms
- 1 tsp coriander seed
- 1 dried red chilli
- 30 g barberries or raisins
- 20 g salt
- 900 ml boiling water
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs outSalted water & the float testKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the tail fat in a kazan or heavy casserole over high heat until the cubes shrink to golden crackling and the fat runs clear; lift them out, add the oil and take it to a shimmer.
- Fry the onions to deep gold, then brown the lamb on every face, then add the carrots and fold gently until they slump and glaze but still hold their edges; grated or stirred hard, they will dissolve.
- Add the cumin, coriander, chilli, barberries, salt and boiling water, bury the garlic head, and simmer uncovered about 40 minutes until the zirvak is dark and the fat floats clear and separate on the surface. 40 min
- Drain the rice and level it over the zirvak without stirring, then pour boiling water over the back of a skimmer to sit 2 cm above the rice and boil hard, uncovered, until the surface water sinks to rice level and craters open across the top.
- Heap the rice into a dome, drive holes to the bottom with a chopstick, cover with a cloth wrapped lid and hold on the lowest heat 25 minutes, until a grain from the top is tender through with no chalk in the centre. 25 min
- Lift out the garlic, turn the rice through the zirvak with a skimmer for the first time, and invert onto a platter with the meat on top.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Syrah or Grenache/GSM
- Also Right
- Malbec
- From the Taps
- Porter
- Zero-Proof
- Pomegranate spritz
Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.
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