This one isn’t holiday food per se, but it is a good dish in cold weather. It’s my wife’s recipe for the Iranian dish called adas pollo, and the first thing to say is that there are other ways to spell it. I use a double-l because otherwise it can get pronounced like the horse-riding sport, which isn’t quite right, and you also see pullo, pullao, and all sort of other spellings (complicated by the way that the same word is used across several related languages). At any rate, the accent is on the second syllable, and it comes out something like “puh-LOH”. Both “a” sounds in the “adas” are short, in case you might be reminded of the name Ada or something similar.
Now that we’re past the transliteration, we can get down to arguing about the recipe. My own impression, having married into an Iranian family, is that Iranian cooking reminds me of disputes in my native South about barbecue. That is, a dish with the same name can have a lot of regional and even family variations. If you ask Iranians from Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz to bring you some “Standard Iranian Dish X”, you’d better be prepared for a range of experiences, the same as if you ask people from Memphis, Austin, Atlanta, and Kansas City to bring you some “barbecue”. Going across the broad barbecue homeland, you will find yourself with beef and/or pork, with ribs, shoulder, and brisket, with flavors ranging from spicy to syrupy sweet, and sauces (if there are sauces!) ranging from dark brown through red through bright yellow to near-white. So it is with Iranian dishes. I could not tell you the number of times an Iranian has said to me “Oh well, that’s how they make (Dish X) over in (Region Y); we don’t do it that way”. This is sometimes followed up (as it can be in the barbecue case as well) by an explanation that those folks over in Region Y are well-known weirdos who wouldn’t know good food if it landed on their heads, etc. Once you get past the simplest recipes, every ingredient seems to be up for debate. So keep this in mind. This is one version of adas pollo, notably one that uses cumin in it, and other recipes you’ll see for it may well not. Personally, I have eaten an awful lot of this stuff over the last twenty-five years, and look forward to plenty more.
It’s a rice and lentil dish, and those familiar with Lebanese or Syrian food will note some similarities to mujadara (or however you’d like to spell that one!) That combination has occurred to many people since the advent of agriculture, and it’s a good one. But in this case, the first thing you’ll need to know is how to make rice Iranian-style. To the amazement (and amusement) of my wife and many others, Iranian rice has become A Thing on the internet over the last few years, with all sorts of people suddenly talking about its finer points. A lot of what gets said about it on recipe blogs and cooking shows makes my wife roll her eyes, because some of these folks make cooking it sound like a test of character, determination, and purity of intent. But it is not a mystical process, although it does require some forethought and preparation time. Here’s how to do it.
To start with, you’ll need some basmati rice. This is kind of a deal-breaker: basmati is a distinctively long-grained and flavorful rice, and it really is the only thing that Iranians (and others in the region) use for such dishes. I have not seen what this preparation is like with “standard” long-grain rice, and you can be sure that if you use even shorter-grained varieties you’re going to be creating a new dish to which you might as well give a new name. Take 2 cups (430g, which conversion I just determined by experiment) of it and put it into a large cooking pot, preferably nonstick – you’ll be using this one all the way through, and despite what you might read, nonstick is perfectly acceptable among Real Iranians (as you can determine by going to a Middle Eastern store and looking at the rice cookers that they’re selling). Rinse this rice out with some cold water three times, swirling it around a bit and pouring off the supernatant each time.
Now cover the rice with more cold water dissolving in 2 or 3 tablespoons of salt (one tablespoon of table salt is 17g). Let this soak for a couple of hours at room temperature. While that’s going, take a cup of dry lentils (plain brown ones, also sometimes labeled as green lentils, about 200g), cover them in water and boil them gently until they’ve softened a bit, but definitely don’t let them go until they’ve started to split or slip out of their skins. You want them sort of “al dente”, since they’ll be cooking more later. Different bags of lentils can vary, so it’s hard to give a time here, but if you’ve never cooked lentils before just realize that it takes maybe ten minutes rather than the whole two hours you’re waiting on with the rice! Drain the lentils and reserve them.
After the soaking period, turn on the heat under the rice pot and bring it up to a boil. Have a colander ready in the sink. My advice is not to walk away once things start getting hot, because boiling rice water is notorious for overflowing pots. Take a few grains out at the start and test them between your teeth as a baseline. Boil the rice for a few minutes until the rice grains are starting to soften – not soft all the way, for sure, but enough to where you notice the difference from when you started. At this point, drain the rice in the colander – you can rinse out the remaining grains from the pot with a little more water and pour them in, too, and if you laid into the salt step a bit too much at the beginning you can rinse some of it off at this point as well.
Melt some butter (1 tablespoon, 14g) in the bottom of the pot or add the equivalent amount of oil – more if you’re feeling expansive. You’ll see recipes that use olive oil here, but my wife, at least, will chuck you out of the kitchen for using it in this dish. The oil and/or butter, though, is essential to get the tahdig (tahdeek), which is the crunchy cooked layer of browned rice that will form on the bottom of the pot, and whose presence is pretty much essential to Iranian rice dishes like this one. You will see an awful lot of stuff written about how incredibly hard it is to get this, how strange and temperamental the whole process is, but let me assure you that is all hot air. Put some butter or oil in there, use a nonstick pot, cook it long enough, and you’ll get it. It’s been happening around here at regular intervals for years, with no incantations and no worries.
Now cover the bottom of the pot well with rice from the colander – give it an inch or so, a couple of centimeters. Distribute some lentils on top of this, and sprinkle some whole cumin seeds evenly over that. Ground cumin is not going to work out here – whole spices versus ground ones are very different beasts (surface area and all) and ground cumin is at any rate generally much less aromatic since it’s often been sitting around a while. Don’t be tempted to use freshly ground cumin seeds, either – just toss them in whole as is. Now repeat those layers until you’ve used up your rice and lentil supplies – you’ll be able to see by eye how much lentil to add to do this, more or less. Some Iranian cooks poke holes into the layers at this point, something about the steam escaping, but we never do that here. See below for a saffron option at this step; I realize that not many people have it sitting around, and it’s not essential.
Cover the pot. It helps if you use a clean dish towel (or a couple of layers of paper towel) across the top of the pot (not sitting on the rice) to make the lid fit more tightly and keep the steam in. Start on medium-high heat for a few minutes until you hear some cooking action from the bottom of the pot, then lower the heat and cook everything for about a half hour. You don’t want to turn the heat down to the minimum; that almost certainly won’t make the tahdig. So go up from that a bit. If you were overenthusiastic, you can always turn it down if you start to get the unmistakeable smell of burnt rice – but note, you will smell browning rice as time goes on, which is much tastier. A little scorched rice never hurt anyone, anyway, but if you get to the end of this recipe and the whole bottom is black, you have indeed overdone things. Don’t worry; it won’t.
While the rice is cooking, take a large onion and cut into fairly thin slices (you can cut it in half to do so, that’s fine). Cook those in some butter or oil on the stove top until they’re golden-to-brown, and then add about a half cup (about 80g) of raisins, and cook those until they’re softened up a bit. Once the rice is done, you have a couple of options, You can dig into the pot (with something that won’t ruin the finish, of course) and get some tahdig off the bottom as you wish with each serving. Or you can take off the lid, turn a sufficiently large plate upside down over it, and the grab the pot by its handles and flip it over in a smooth but dramatic motion to turn the rice onto the plate upside down, tahdig on full display. That’s how you see it at right, in a photo taken by a friend after my wife delivered a batch to her. I enjoy doing that part, but some people find it a bit intimidating, with visions of pollo all over the floor. Your call! Serve the rice, at any rate, with the onion/raisin mixture for each person to add some to their portion(s), as shown in the earlier action photo above, which was taken right here in the test kitchens before I ate the lot. Enjoy!
Optional saffron addition during the cooking: if you have some saffron (threads or ground), you can take about 1/8 of a teaspoon of it and put it into a cup or glass. Pour some boiling water (10 or 20 mL) over that and let it steep for a bit, and then pour spoonfuls of the deep orange liquid over the top of the rice after you’ve layered everything in the pot and before the cover-and-steam step).
