Rice and Travel

A few travel stories told through a few forms of rice

Welcome to my newsletter!

In the first edition, I take a trip back in time, and revisit three rice dishes that I encountered during my travels.

Plov in Tashkent

In the 1960s, much of Tashkent was destroyed in an earthquake. The Soviets rebuilt it to be the “model” communist city, which meant that today it was full of large, characterless, blocky buildings. I spent a lot of time simply walking through the city. I visited Shastri street, where there is a statue of Lal Bahadur Shastri, dedicated to him after he died here in…mysterious circumstances.

Walking through the streets of Tashkent after lunch meant that the air would be heavy with the smoke and smell of spices emitted by chefs stirring rice and meat in their gigantic woks. They were all making Plov, which — as multiple people told me — was Uzbekistan’s national dish.

I think of Plov as pulao, but with lots of meat, lots of fat, and almost no vegetables, . Every grain of rice is coated with delicious fat, and there are pieces of meat (beef mostly, but sometimes lamb), both small and big decorating the plate. A local told me that the Soviets had decimated the local agriculture, replacing all the food crops with the cotton (and the slavery that accompanies it) that Uzbekistan is now famous for. Plov is a dish born out of this scarcity of ingredients. Rice is cooked slowly in a meat broth and a few root vegetables. Most of the plovs I tasted had only carrots.

Close to the hostel where I was staying was a plov stall that reminded me of the Shiv-Sagar type restaurants in Bangalore: open kitchen, open seating, and fast, but unfussy service. Starting the second day of my stay till I left Tashkent two weeks later, the chef would smile at me, and give me extra meat.

Tahdig In Iran

My first big stop when I cycled through Iran was at the house of Yasmin and Mohammed in Lar, Iran. I had found them through warmshowers (couchsurfing for cyclists, in case you haven’t heard of it before), and they welcomed me warmly into their home.

Mohammed ran a mobile parts store. He was quiet and introverted, but smiled generously. Yasmin was much more open and friendly. She told me about how, as far as she knew, she was the first local woman who cycled freely in Lar. It had been challenging at first, and she used to dress up in mens clothes so as to not attract attention. These days, it was better because people had started to recognize her, and she was proud that there were some younger girls on their bikes cycling these days.

The two of them made me feel like I was a part of their family. They took me to Yasmin’s sisters engagement, to eat local Lar-i kebabs, and to a family outing in the canyons outside of town. I cooked aloo paratha for them, and Yasmin cooked up a storm for me including, of course, the great Iranian Tahdig.

Tahdig refers to rice that’s been cooked so that there is a burnt, cripsy layer at the bottom of the pot. I loved the drama of flipping the pot onto the plate, and watching nervously to check if the bottom layer has made it all in one piece onto the plate.

When I left Lar, I didn’t have any warmshowers hosts lined up, and I was just cycling happily on the highway, when a family invited me to join them for lunch. No prizes for guessing what was on the menu.

After lunch, the older man in the picture above invited me to stay with his father in the next town. His father had spent a lot of time with Indians in Dubai, and understood Hindi, so I had an amazing time in his house — a story for another post!

I’ve made Tahdig multiple times now (using this recipe from the amazing Samin Nostrat), and the beautiful secret of it all is trust. Once you layer the rice and shut the pot, that’s it. No peeking, no worrying. It will all be fine in the end.

Fried Rice made the Chinese Way

Ah. Chinese Fried Rice. My love affair with Fried Rice started when I found the book “Wisdom of Chinese Cooking” by Grace Young. I bought it for 50c from the basement sale in the Seattle Public Library. Or maybe it wasn’t in the basement? I can’t remember now, but I do recall the lovely descriptions of basic techniques in the first few chapters.

I learned from the book that what’s important in making “chinese” fried rice is the technique: use high heat, fry vegetables separately and not for long, use old rice, add sugar, ginger, and garlic to the sauce, cook the egg correctly, and so on.

This is the recipe I use these days. The sauce is different, the ingredients are different, and its for noodles not rice. But hey, I did say that the technique was the most important thing.

A few years after Seattle, and a few months after Iran, I was in Hungary, volunteering on a farm with my partner. The first dish I made for her in that beautiful, mosquito-ridden outdoor kitchen was a stir-fried couscous. I still remember how impressed she was with how good it tasted, and how happy her happiness made me.

We were talking about this moment — the one where she ate couscous and liked it — last week, when I made fried rice again. I said that the stir fry was an important milestone in our relationship, but she rolled her eyes and said I’m being (as usual) a drama queen.