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.
