Experiment 2D - Plov Problem

Okay, so it has been a while since I posted. Why? Because I have been embarrassed to reveal the final result of Experiment 2. Now that many weeks have passed, the dark memory of this experiment had faded, and I am able to admit my many mistakes.

The photos below tell the whole story. I began by cooking the onions and the sheep meat in the regular non-stick frying pan. (Sauteed with a little bit of olive oil, as I recall.) Then, I carefully placed the onion & meat mixture in the bottom of the 2000mL beaker, followed by a layer of carrots, and a layer of rice. Then, I filled the container with enough water to cover the rice. Then the contents of the beaker was heated until the rice was completed. This entire process required over 90 minutes.


The end result really did not appear like something I would want to eat, but I went ahead and inverted the beaker into a bowl anyway...


Then, for the grand finale, the beaker was removed, and there, laying in the bowl, was my first attempt at plov.


Just lovely, isn't it? After a few days of trying to eat it, I changed it into something else. I added vegetables, some cow meat, and my favorite Edamame beans, and ended up with an unusual Turkmen stir-fry combination...

Experiment 2C: Onion Denial

So, we finally get to an ingredient that I know and undertand: onions.

I have been chopping onions for at least 20 years now. I know all about onions. I cry every time I chop an onion. I love onions. I usually chop onions for use in Mexican food. In Mexican food, onions are chopped into fairly large chunks and when you are finished cooking the onion chunks, you can still know that they are onions.


For plov, however, the situation is much different. Ideally, you want to put a lot of onion into your plov. For every kilogram of meat that you use, you want to include a kilogram of onions. Unlike Mexican food, however, the onions are supposed to be chopped so small that they "disappear" during the cooking process. I have heard from more than one source that the onions must disappear entirely. I am beginning to suspect that all of Central Asia is in denial about how many onions they eat. If they can't see them, then they must not be there.


So, I did my best to prepare the onions, but I must confess, I was just too lazy to chop them thin enough. I resorted to chopping them to about the same size as I use for Mexican food. This is clearly a failure on my part to fully understand the importance of disappearing onions in Central Asian culture. I ended up producing about 1000 mL of chopped onions.

Experiment 2B: Lavish Lamb

Okay, so I'll admit that I have never really purchased lamb before this project. When I think about meat, I think about cows, chickens, pigs, and fish (in that order). I never really ever recall saying, "hey, let's go out and get some lamb for dinner".

So, I went in search of lamb for this experiment. My local grocer, the amazing Kroger store, has tons of different products for sale. They have shrimp from Norway, they have Atlantic salmon raised in the Pacific ocean in Chile, they have cheese from France, they have wine from Australia, they have Jerk Sauce from Bermuda, they have cow parts galore, they have pork, they have veal, they have sharks, etc. But try to find a decent piece of lamb. All they have are some very high priced lamb shoulder chops which are mostly full of bone.

I thought briefly about substituting some other meat in place of the lamb. But no, this is supposed to be authentic Central Asian plov, so it must be lamb. So, I paid a lot of money for a little lamb. But, the label on the package assured me that I was at the "right store" and that I was paying the "right price". This sounds like something I would hear if I was bartering for a decent carpet at the Tolkuchka bazaar immediately after the vendors had determined I was not from their country and easy to fool.

Actually, I suspect that if I had been at the Tolkuchka bazaar, I probably could have purchased an entire lamb for not much more than I paid for these two pathetic pieces of Kroger sheep shoulders. Of course, at the Tolkuchka, I could have purchased an entire camel, provided I had brought my truck with me.

So, I brought the lamb home and carefully removed the meat from the bones. I chopped the meat into small pieces and I also kept the bones to use in the plov. My good friend told me that you should use the bones during the cooking process because they add flavor. I'm not sure I believe this, but I thought I would give the bones a try anyway.

Experiment 2A: Carrots up Close

SPECIAL NOTE: Experiment 2 is my first time making a dish of plov. I have divided up the description of Experiment 2 into multiple parts. Each part discusses a different ingredient and how it was prepared. This part is "Experiment 2A" and is all about the carrots.

When you consider plov, it looks so simple. Just carrots, rice, meat, and onions. For a little added flair, you can add the spice "cumin" (kind of a Russian tradition), or some raisins or some saffron (probably a little Persian influence there). But your basic plov is just four ingredients. That's it.

So, in Experiment 1, we considered the rice. Now, here in Experiment 2, we continue our scientific quest and take a close look at the carrots. There are so many questions you could ask about carrots.

My number one question is why are all the carrots the same size? It just doesn't seem natural. The name on the bag, "Bunny Luv", just doesn't seem very natural either.

I have to wonder how they get every single carrot in the bag to be almost exactly 5.0 centimeters in length. An all the diameters fall within a very narrow tolerance as well. I can't imagine what kind of farm produces such uniform carrots. It almost seems alien.

It turns out that the ultimate source of these uniform carrots is Grimmway Farms. It appears that Mr. Grimm was instrumental in introducing so called "baby carrots" to the marketplace.

One of the challenges associated with these carrots is that it take a lot of time to cut them up because you can only get about four pathetic pieces from these alien carrots.

And you have to be very careful not to cut your fingers when working with such small objects and a sharp knife. After some experimenting, I found I could get four respectable pieces from each Grimm's carrot. I have a feeling that these four pieces are still too big for a good plov.


In the end, after a lot of cutting, I was able to generate approximately 800.0 mL of chopped carrots. These I set aside for later use in my first real plov experiment. More regarding that fiasco will be posted later.

Experiment 1: Calibration of Uncle Ben's Rice

Taking a scientific approach the plov problem requires standardization of ingredients, both the source of the ingredients and their proper proportion. Where I live, one readily available source of rice is from a fellow named Uncle Ben.

Where I live, Uncle Ben packages his rice in plastic bags, each holding 907.0 grams of purportedly whole grain brown rice. The bag extols the benefits of the enclosed rice, stressing that the product is both a natural source of fiber (so is tumbleweed, but I don't eat that) and naturally low in fat (just like arsenic) and cholesterol free (just like gasoline).

On the back side of Uncle Ben's rice package, there are simple instructions for simple people. For every 1.00 cups of dry rice, just mix with 2.25 cups of water, and optionally, with 2 tablespoons of butter. We're not going to be adding butter to our plov (because it will be greasy enough on its own), so we are going to just go with the rice and water.

To the scientific mind, all of this talk about "cups" is very confusing. A scientist prefers to work with the metric system. I instantly encounter a point of confusion when converting from cups to milliliters (mL). I have one cup in my kitchen that assures me that 1 cup equals exactly 250 mL. I have another cup in my kitchen that states that 1 cup equals 236.64 mL.

My gut instinct tells me that there is absolutely no way that the French (who invented the metric system) and the English (who dislike the French) could have possibly agreed on such a convenient conversion factor as 1 cup equals 250 mL. After further investigation, it appears there really is no accepted standard. So, just to make things as complex as possible, I'm going to use the least convenient conversion factor, namely, that one cup equals 236.64 mL.

And to make the whole experience feel more scientific, I'm going to make the rice in a large Pyrex beaker that I obtained especially for making plov. The advantage of using a beaker is that you can easily see what is going on inside the cooking vessel. They also just look cool sitting there on your stove, don't they?

Safety Note: This 2000mL beaker is brand new and has never been used in a chemistry laboratory. I also took the time to clean it by boiling soapy water in it prior to first use.

So, translating the simple instructions on the back of Uncle Ben's rice package into more precise metric instructions, it appears that the proper way to make rice is to combine 236.64 mL of dry rice with 532.44 mL of water.


Here is a record of what happened during my first experiment with Uncle Ben's rice:

17:01 To a 2000 mL beaker is added 236.64 mL of Uncle Ben's Whole Grain Brown Rice and 532.44 mL of tap water. The beaker (without any cover) is placed over "high heat" on the front burner of a Maytag stove.

17:10 Beaker contents having achieved a full boil, the heat is reduced to just above the "low" setting on the Maytag stove so that contents of the beaker can continue to "simmer" for a while. A watch glass is placed on top of the beaker to provide a cover. (Okay, so it isn't a watch glass, just a small plate I found in my kitchen.) The spout of the beaker provides a small opening so that the heated system remains open. (Important safety tip: Never heat a closed system).

17:36 Contents of beaker appear to be nearing the end point of the reaction. Very little water is now visible above the level of the rice. Beaker (still covered) is removed from the heat and allowed to sit for a while.

17:59 Contents of beaker are examined and found to be a bit too moist and mushy. Next time around, we'll have to try either a bit less water or a bit longer simmering.

18:00 Contents of beaker are placed on a plate and then covered with some leftover shrimp creole that I made a few days ago. Central Asia will have to wait on New Orleans tonight.

The Quest for Perfect Plov

The purpose of this blog is to record for posterity my personal quest to create a perfect plov entree. I will be taking a scientific approach to this problem, documenting each step carefully, and hopefully arriving at a dish that would be acceptable in both the West (Europe and the Americas) and by the true plov practitioners of Central Asia.

So what is plov?

It is basically a dish made from rice, carrots, onions, and meat (usually lamb, sometimes beef, preferably with a lot of fat). The ingredients are assembled in layers for cooking: meat/onion mixture on the bottom, chopped carrots in the middle, and rice on the top. After cooking, the entire stratified ensemble is inverted for presentation, resulting in a layer of meat on top of a layer of carrots on top of a layer of rice.

Authentic Central Asian plov recipes are notoriously greasy/oily by modern Western standards. It is often eaten with bare hands, resulting in a mingling of greases and oils from the cooked meat and from the plov partaker's hands that is supposed to enhance the overall flavor of the dish.