Shirin Polo

The fruit and nuts go on after the steaming, never during it.

Vegetarian, but not vegan — contains dairy (butter).

Ingredients

• 600 g long-grain white rice
• 3 tablespoons salt, for the soaking and parboiling water
• 80 g dried barberries, rinsed
• 100 g dried apricots, sliced
• 80 g dates, stoned and sliced
• 60 g prunes, stoned and sliced
• 60 g slivered pistachios
• 60 g slivered almonds
• peel of 1 orange, pith removed, in fine shreds
• 60 g caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon saffron threads, ground and steeped in 4 tablespoons hot water
• 100 ml sunflower oil
• 50 g butter

Method

1. THE FRUIT AND NUTS GO ON AFTER THE STEAMING, NEVER DURING IT. Its own article describes the finished rice being unmoulded onto a platter and then topped with the dried fruit and nuts, and the reason is mechanical: apricots, dates and prunes release a lot of sugar and water under fifty minutes of steam, and anything sweet sitting in the pot bleeds into the rice and makes the lower half sticky and brown. Cooked separately and piled on at the end, each thing keeps its own shape, colour and texture, which is the whole look of the dish.
2. THE ORANGE PEEL IS BLANCHED THREE TIMES AND THEN CANDIED. Fine shreds with no white pith, into boiling water for one minute, drained, and repeated twice with fresh water each time. Then simmered in the sugar with four tablespoons of water until syrupy. Unblanched peel is harshly bitter and the bitterness spreads through everything it touches.
3. THE BARBERRIES ARE THE ONE THING THAT MUST NOT GET HOT FOR LONG. Rinsed, then thirty to forty seconds in butter with a spoonful of the saffron water and nothing more. They are tiny and they have almost no flesh; a minute too long and they are black and acrid.
4. THE OTHER FRUIT IS SOFTENED IN THE SYRUP, THE NUTS ARE TOASTED DRY. Apricots, dates and prunes into the orange syrup off the heat for ten minutes to plump. Pistachios and almonds in a dry pan until they just colour. Toasting them in the syrup makes them soft, which loses the only crunch on the plate.
5. THE RICE IS SOAKED IN SALTED WATER AND PARBOILED TO A FIRM CORE. Rinse until clear, two hours in cold salted water, drain. Six to eight minutes at a hard boil with the rest of the salt, until a grain gives outside and is chalky at the centre. Drain, rinse briefly with lukewarm water.
6. IT IS STEAMED PLAIN, WITH A CRUST, AND TURNED OUT. Oil in the pot, the rice heaped into a cone, saffron water poured over, cloth-wrapped lid, five minutes medium and fifty minutes on the lowest heat. Its article notes it is sometimes made with a crisp base, which is then used as the garnish when the dish is unmoulded.
7. IT IS A CELEBRATION DISH AND THAT DICTATES THE SCALE. Its article records it at weddings, birthdays and holidays, served as iftar during Ramadan, and in Persian Jewish communities at Purim, Pesach and Rosh Hashanah. Six hundred grams of rice for eight is the smallest amount at which the topping looks like a topping rather than a scattering.
8. IT IS A SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF A MORE ELABORATE DISH, AND THAT OTHER DISH IS NOT WRITTEN HERE. Its own article calls it a simplified morassa' polo -- jewelled rice -- which arranges the same fruits and nuts in separate bands rather than scattered. That dish has no usable article of its own, so it is deliberately not a page on this site rather than quietly folded into this one.
9. SERVED WITH PLAIN SPICED CHICKEN. Its article names spiced baked chicken, and the dish needs it: a sweet rice on its own is cloying after a few mouthfuls.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Iran · All recipes