Skip to main content

Featured Post

My cookbook: "Tehran to New York"

On the Norouz day of 2020 spring, I finally published my book. The manuscript is titled: "Tehran to New York: A culinary bridge between Persian and Western cultures" and aims at presenting a unique blend of classic and contemporary Persian recipes, as well as samples of Western-style cuisine, offered in a Persian context. It is important to build bridges between cultures, and not walls. This book aims at constructing a bridge between the Persian and Western cultures. The book may be ordered here: https://www.amazon.com/Tehran-New-York-culinary-cultures-ebook/dp/B0861H47GS/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=tehran+to+new+york&qid=1584810930&sr=8-1  

Persian tuna and broccoli Biryani


As was previously mentioned here, Biryani dishes have a Persian origin and found their way towards Indian subcontinent by the Mughals. In this post, I developed a modern Biryani dish based on Umami, sweet, sour and spicy flavors. The alleged Umami flavor here comes from the Broccoli and tuna; the sweet comes through caramelized onions; the sour comes from preserved lemon; and the spiciness comes from dried Kashmiri chilies, as well as the fresh Poblano.   

Ingredients:

For the rice:
2 cups Jasmine rice
salt and water as needed to par-boil the rice
1/2 TSP turmeric
For the stuffing:
2 cans tuna in oil (10.58 Oz ~300 gr)
1 Poblano chili, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 whole dry Kashmiri red chilies, torn into small pieces
3 slices of preserved lemon, finely chopped  
2.64 Oz (~75 gr) parsley, finely chopped
7.05 Oz (~200 gr) broccoli (fresh or frozen), finely chopped
1/4 cup caramelized onions



Drain the oil from tuna cans and pour it in a hot pan. Saute the Poblano, Kashmiri chili pieces and garlic. Once vegetables are translucent, add the tuna meat and chopped preserved lemon. Lightly brown tuna and lemon and set the mixture aside to cool down.  In a large pot, bring 8 cups of heavily salted water to a boil. Add the turmeric and rice. Boil the rice until the grains are Al dente (for more instructions on Persian rice dum cooking method, check here). Drain the rice and liberally run cold water over the rice. Unlike pasta, it is crucial to drain Persian rice with cold water and to wash off the starch.

Mix parsley and broccoli with the drained rice. Before doing so, cover the bottom of the Biryani pot with a thin layer of plain yellow rice (this is to ensure that parsley and broccoli pieces do not directly contact the bottom and to avoid them burning). 

Arrange three layers of rice and stuff the tuna filling and caramelized onions in between the layers. 


Dum cook according to the instructions of this post. 
Tahdig (i.e. the crispy rice on the bottom) was the reason we covered the bottom with a thin layer of plain yellow rice...a truly Persian delicacy. 

Comments