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.