I’m not a good cook. Well, I know how to handle food in such a way that it will be fully cooked, and it will have some flavor. But when it comes to mastering actual recipes and flavor profiles, I have a long way to go. I figured I’d try my hand at some Iranian recipes. I knew about this famous crispy rice dish, found out it’s called TAHCHIN, (the actual crispy part is called TAHDIG), and searched out some YouTube videos to find the recipe. Of course there were various recipes, but I settled on this one because it included chicken, which I finally had. It seemed easy enough.
So I began.
Soaked 1.5 cups rice with 2 tsp salt for an hour.
Rinsed the rice and boiled it for about 6 minutes (based on
a different video), then drained rice into a colander.
In another pot, roughly chopped an onion and put it along
with some raw chicken into a pot of boiling water, covered for 20 minutes.
Then put some saffron into a mug of boiling water. I had
these cubes of saffron. So used one cube.
Then in another bowl, mixed 2 egg yolks well, added 10 oz (I
don’t have a way to measure that so I just eye-balled it) plain yogurt with
some chili powder (recipe said ground chili pepper, but whatever). Added some
of the saffron water and mixed it all up. Then chopped up the cooked chicken and added it to the
yogurt mix.
Then mixed 2 more yolks into another bowl, add it to another
pot with 2 tbls oil, add 2 big spoonfulls of the yogurt without the chicken and
2 spoons of rice (all eyeballed from the video), which was mixed and then put
into a flat layer on the bottom of the pot.
Then added the chicken (that was mixed into the yogurt earlier as seen in the pic), and 3 tbsp of dried barberries and add
the rest of the rice on top in a flat layer.
Then added ¼ cup oil into the remaining yogurt bowl, some more saffron water, then some water from the chicken/onion pot, mix and pour all over the rice in the pot.
Then cook this with lid covered on a low flame for-- get this, TWO HOURS.
Fry some dried barberries (ZERESHK) in another pan and put aside for
garnish.
I’d remembered from other tahdig videos that we need to put
a dish towel between the top of the pot and the lid, so I did that after a few
minutes, assuming the lady in the chicken tahdig video just forgot or felt she didn't need it, but I had a gut feeling to do it.
After about half an hour, I smelled something like a subtle
burning aroma. I ignored it because the recipe called for another hour and a
half!
Then after another 20 minutes, the smell was too much.
Something was burning!
So.
I stopped the rice cooking. I flipped the pot over hoping to get that firm cake texture, but it all fell apart except for the crust on the bottom.
Got to the bottom of the pot and found the rice burned to a
black burnt crisp. Not good.
So I salvaged whatever rice was not seemingly burnt, and it
looked pretty good! My husband said it tasted good as well, but he's never picky so I don't know what the average person would think.
But the whole thing was a big fail. What went wrong?! Was it all the deviations I took from the video recipe, all my eyeballing? I was determined to try again, which I did the next day.
I followed the recipe from the video with some tips from this article on PersianMama.
Saffron water into yogurt
Make a pyramid with the parboiled rice
Poke holes into it
Cover with cloth and lid
Add saffron to some of the rice for color
Prepare to scrape out the tahdig
Hooray, it's not burnt!
It's a bit weak though
Serve tahdig on the side, make the dish look pretty with barberries, walnuts, and pistachios
It turned out better this time. The crispy rice was not
burnt, but I would say it was rather weak. Maybe if I’d left it a few more
minutes it’d have been the thicker, crunchier kind. So this dish is called ZERESHK POLOW with MORGH (barberry rice with chicken).
In any case, I don’t think I’ll be making it again, unless I
get a better tahdig pot. Because guess what I found out after the fact:
YUP.
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