Albaloo Polow – Sour Cherry Persian Rice

You guys….it’s NOWRUZ time!!!

Well not officially, not just yet. It’s actually in a few days, but we’re celebrating it early here on the blog. If you need a primer on the basics and backstory of Nowruz, I encourage you to click here for last year’s post.

For those of you who don’t want to give me residual clicks, which by the way. Not cool. Here’s a quick intro from last year:

Persian New Year or Nowruz is a Persian holiday that celebrates the first day of spring, which is the vernal equinox. For Iranians, Zoroastrians, and some other peoples in Central Asia, this is the most important holiday of the year. It’s Persian Christmas, for a simplistic comparison, families gather around to celebrate the coming of the new year. Nowruz symbolizes rebirth and new life. Many of the dishes and decorations that Persians use for this holiday are supposed to represent those themes.

Nowruz literally translates to New Day, and it marks the beginning of the new year in the Persian Calendar. Currently, in the Persian Calendar the year is 1394, not 2016. It’s called the Solar Hijri calendar and its year 0 is supposed to fall in line with when the Muslim Prophet, Muhammad, migrated to Medina in 622 A.D.

This year I want to describe for you what it’s like to be an Iranian American kid celebrating a holiday in a country that literally 99% of the population has no freaking clue what you’re celebrating. Some do now because our culture has gone a little lame-stream media, but back in the old days when people all confused us with Iraq, Nowruz was most assuredly not what the cool kids were celebrating in elementary school. But life has a funny way of working out, now it’s so chic and hip to know about Nowruz or to know about Iranian food. WHERE WAS THIS WHEN I WAS A KID?! Ugh.

So let me set the scene for you. It’s the mid 90’s.

I’m in Elementary School.

I lived (still do) in the burbs of Maryland.

My excused absence letter would read as follows:

Please excuse (The Unmanly Chef) from today’s class due to the fact that he must celebrate a cultural holiday.

Every March 19th/20th depending on when the New Year was actually occurring, I would get to rub in my stupid classmate’s faces that I got to leave school early. Not only did I get to leave school early, I got to leave to go to a party where I would get a copious amount of presents. The sheer jealousy that exuded from my friends auras was well worth the decades of blank stares that I would receive when trying to describe Nowruz or my culture to the uninformed.

Being an Iranian kid growing up in the States and celebrating Nowruz is kind of like having 3 heads when you would explain it to your American friends.

“So what do you celebrate again?….what?…Spring?…Is that a religious holiday?…Why do you get off school for that!?”

Once I got to leave school or skip school all together, I and all the other kids in our family would race to my Mommon Joon’s house where she would have the house primed a ready to go for the New Year. She’d be making fried fish, kookoo, sabzi polow THE WORKS! Home girl knew how to throw a Nowruz party. We would all then run down to the basement where we would engage in Super Nintendo death matches with games like Mortal Combat, Street Fighter, and Super Soccer. Seriously for the kids of this generation, you’ve been done a disservice by the gaming community as the wonder and joy from games is nothing like it was back then. BUT ANYWAYS I Digress.

As us stupid kids were downstairs playing, the adults upstairs were making sure that Nowruz would go off without a hitch. Once New Years hit, the euphoria was palpable among our entire family. The adults were thankful for another year together in a foreign country that wasn’t their homeland, meanwhile the kids were pumped because we were getting money! That money would in turn purchase video games and other toys.

So there you have it. Nowruz as the Unmanly Chef. Now today’s dish. Albaloo Polow or sour cherry rice.

 

Albaloo is a sour cherry, not your standard cherry. But a sour cherry.

Per the interwebs:

Prunus cerasus is thought to have originated as a natural hybrid between Prunus avium and Prunus fruticosa in the Iranian Plateau or Eastern Europe where the two species come into contact. Prunus fruticosa is believed to have provided its smaller size and sour tasting fruit. The hybrids then stabilised and interbred to form a new, distinct species.^[8]

Cultivated sour cherries were selected from wild specimens of Prunus cerasus and the doubtfully distinct P. acida from around the Caspian and Black Seas, and were known to the Greeks in 300 BC. They were also extremely popular with Persians and the Romans who introduced them into Britain long before the 1st century AD. The fruit remains popular in modern-day Iran.

So there you have it, sour cherries are distinctly Persian and therefore perfect for a Nowruz dish. Sour cherries are hard to find and are rarely available at grocery stores, but they are plentiful for a short season here in Maryland. The cherries are available at local farms or at someone’s house, luckily for me my parents have a sour cherry tree so I picked as many cherries as possible and froze them for this dish. The sour cherry is just as it sounds, sour. So you have to cook it down to make it tasty for dishes.

Albaloo Polow is not a dish you want to order out if you go to a Persian restaurant, it’s rarely fresh and they usually just use a preserve. The real thing is something out of this world that you have to experience. The sweet tangy flavor of the cherries counterbalances perfectly with the saffron and the delicious chicken or meatballs in the rice. If you have access to sour cherries, you have to try this dish. It’s really easy.

So enjoy this Nowruz and try this awesome dish!

 

Recipe – Albaloo Polow – Sour Cherry Rice

Ingredients

2 Cups of Basmati Rice (Soak the rice in water for 6 hours and then strain out the liquid until the water runs clear)

4 Cups of Water

4 Cups of Sour Cherries (pitted) (or Sour Cherry Preserve with the juice separated out)

7 Cups of Sugar

2 Tsp. Salt

1/2 Cup of Saffron Water

2 Tbsp. Butter

1 Pound of Ground Beef or Ground Lamb

1/2 White Onion Shredded

Method

Step 1 – Make the cherries, if you have sour cherry preserve you can skip this step. In a large pot spread out the cherries, then pour your sugar over them, and finally add a lot of water over them enough water so it’s about inch of water over the cherries.

Step 2- Cook the cherries down until you have a syrupy mixture, be careful not to cook it down too much so that the syrup is too thick.

Step 3- Once the cherries are ready, strain the juice (keep it for drinks), and pull out the cherries.

Step 4- Now make your meatballs, mix the ground beef with the onion, form them into quarter sized balls and bake them in the oven covered with tin foil at 350 for about 30 minutes, until cooked).

Step 5- Once the meatballs are cooked, leave them covered in the oven at a low heat.

Step 6- Now prepare your rice.

Step 7 – Pour the rice into a large nonstick pot, cover with 4 cups of water.

Step 8- With the rice cooking on high heat, have a mesh colander ready to strain the water.

Step 9 – Once the rice grains have elongated, strain the rice of all it’s water.

Step 10- Once you strain the rice, add your butter to the pot and now carefully add about 2 handfuls of rice grains to the pot. Then add a layer of cherries, saffron and meatballs to the rice. Repeat this for several layers.

Step 11- Take a clean towel and wrap the lid with it, then reduce the heat to low and allow the rice to cook for 30 minutes at least until you have tahdig.

Step 12- Once you have tahdig, serve, be careful because this tahdig can burn due to the sugar in the cherries.

*You can sub in chicken instead of meatballs or none at all*