How to make the Best Azerbaijani Plov | Lamb Pilaf Recipe | Plov

Hi guys, welcome to my channel. Today is a slightly different episode. I am going to be cooking traditional plov, which is pilaf, which is basically rice with meat and different things, in a traditional home with an amazing woman that is from Azerbaijan and she's going to show us how to make it. And I know a lot of you requested plov before, so let's get started. So we need to cut the meat first so it's lamb and that's the traditional way so you can replace the meat but ideally you should use the beautiful cut of lamb So we want to add your lamb into a pot with cold water And you want to chop the pieces quite roughly. We're going to cook this for about 40 minutes so we're gonna take off the bits from the the lamb so you want to just move it around and using a spoon and little pot like that just put all the bits that we don't want it's like a foam that comes up when you boil the meat so we're gonna add lime and this is dry lime and it adds a lot of flavor to the meat so that's a little trick for you guys little secret we're gonna finally chop the onion so we're gonna add butter into the pan we're gonna fry our onions so add your onion inside and you want to chop your onions like this so it's a bit like half a sphere we're gonna add one teaspoon of turmeric we're going to fry this for about 10 minutes or so and then we're gonna add our meat and cook this all together for a bit longer so the meats nearly done we're gonna take that out and you want to add that into your onions now we're gonna take a new pan add a bit more butter I'm gonna add all our meat with onions smells delicious so we're gonna add all these greens it seems like a lot but it's not so we're also gonna add some fresh mint and that's gonna add a lot of flavor so you want to add about two big handfuls so just chop it up roughly and as you can see we have a lot of greens over here you can add as many greens as you want but we're adding a whole variety here we've got dill we've got baby basil we've got parsley we've got mint and we also gonna add some thyme and now we're gonna add all our chopped greens in there that we did earlier look at that it seems like it's a lot but trust me guys it's all gonna go down so we're gonna add the greens in stages we wanted to kind of cook it down and it's gonna go to the bottom oh my god smells amazing you can really smell all the greens in here what we're gonna do we're gonna add about a ladle of your stock that you've cooked your lamb in and then will give it a lot of flavor it's gonna make it all nice and tender so we're adding the rest of our greens and we might add one more ladle of our broth in there so we're gonna add some basmati rice and this is specific one that you can get online or in stores it has to be basmati and there are several steps we're gonna do to wash this now and prepare the rice and you can see it's kind of thicker grain now the water is clear we're gonna add some salt this is pink Himalayan salt so in a new pot we're gonna add water and then salt and we're gonna boil this until it reaches basically the boiling point and then we're gonna add the rice now we're gonna add the rice into the hot water together with everything that's in there so we're adding about half a kilo of rice in there so we're gonna stir that we want to drain the rice we only cook this for a few minutes you want to do a little test on your tongue so the rice needs to be quite crunchy when you bite into it so you cannot overcook this that's the whole secret of this dish so we're just gonna leave it to drain so look at the rice I'm just gonna show you guys it's quite hard but it still breaks in your hand so we're gonna add one cup of flour and then we're gonna add two tablespoons of natural yogurt and this way this is called Kashmach and this goes basically at the bottom of your pilaf so two teaspoons sorry two tablespoons of yogurt we can mix that through we're also gonna add some soda and pinch of salt then you want to add olive oil or just any oil that you have about two to three tablespoons and just mix everything through once you mixed with a spoon you want to kind of go in with your hand and make sure everything is incorporated and kind of becomes like a nice dough and this part is optional but a lot of people love it because it's crunchy and very delicious so now we're gonna roll out this piece of dough so we're gonna add a bit of butter into a deep pan and traditionally you would put it on something like this which makes it nice and hot if you don't have this however you can use something metallic if you don't have it at all that's you know okay too but then you yeah then you need to have a pot with a very deep so add your dough inside so we're doing this you know we can eat this part anyway but mainly we're doing this as well so the rice doesn't burn now to make the decoration beautiful you can take a small cup or a cake ring or a cookie cutter and just cut out little pieces like that look at that so pretty we're gonna drain the rice and so we're just gonna add this into our pan over here then you want to add butter about 200 grams and you want to kind of break it with a teaspoon so just kind of dig into your butter and spread it all over the rice so we need to add like a kitchen towel or something like a tissue onto your lid so we don't have any condensate and just close it up and we're gonna leave this for about 40 minutes at low heat so over here we've got some saffron and we added a bit of hot water and we're gonna leave it to brew and this is really important to have as it adds a lot of flavor and color as well so now we're gonna add our saffron hey guys