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Recipe Blog - thebroadroom.net: Green Rice
Green Rice
posted by Colleen Shirazi,
Sunday, June 26, 2005
at 7:19 PM (Pacific)
Green rice is the best kind of rice. It goes with roast or pan-fried fish of all sorts, or fried eggs, or roast beef you make in a baking bag, or canned tuna fish. It's also one of the few Iranian rice dishes that's fairly hard to screw up, i.e. it's not as touchy as your plain steamed "chelo," for some reason.
Note: for the best rice, soak the rice for at least an hour, up to several hours, in advance. You can still make it without soaking, but it's much better and easier to make if you do.
More notes: there's a version of this that has lima beans in it. If you're serving it with fish, don't bother with the beans, but for the roast beef...take one bag of frozen lima beans and empty it into a bowl of water.
Pop the beans one by one out of their skins. This is time-consuming! Get someone to help.
When you're putting the parboiled rice back into the pot, mix in the peeled beans then.
* 5 cups uncooked basmati rice (this makes a lot, you'll have enough for four adults and two kids without stressing...you can also scale it down to 4 or 3 cups)
* Either a bag of premixed "Bagheleh Polo" herbs (available at your middle eastern grocery) or you can mix your own...this would be bulk amounts of dried parsley, dried dill, and dried leeks
* Butter
Wash the rice four or five times in lukewarm water. The idea is to remove surface starch, so wash it until the water is reasonably clear.
Soak the rice in enough salted water to cover for at least one hour, if possible. There should be enough salt to make the water taste pretty salty, like sea water.
In a heavy-bottomed, non-stick pot, bring some water to boil. For the first stage, you will need enough water to boil the rice (including your soaking water) so plan accordingly.
When it's boiling, add in the rice and its soaking water. Stir to mix everything and make sure the water still tastes salty like sea water.
Add in your dried herbs. How much? I lift up a big spoonful of the rice. It should look green, the rice in the spoon should look covered with green herbs. This can be half the premixed bag. If you're mixing your own, I use a quarter-cup measure to add in the parsley, dill and some leeks...keep adding until the rice in the spoon looks nice and green.
Let it come to the boil again. At first you can cook it on fairly high heat. Keep checking...when the rice starts to look expanded, turn the heat down.
Now...check frequently. You're looking to see when the white core of the rice grains is gone. The rice should look gently, but not completely expanded. Bite into a few grains...there should be no hard crunchy core in there, but the rice should not yet be entirely soft.
Drain everything into a colander. You can try saving some of the herbs by placing the colandar over a pot in the sink. Anyhow, drain it and rinse lightly with cold tap water, trying not to wash the herbs away.
Get your heavy-bottomed pot back on the stove on medium heat. Add a layer of vegetable oil in the bottom, enough to cover and a little bit more.
Get your drained rice next to the pot. Take big spoonfuls of rice and place them on top of the oil in the pot. If you're using lima beans, now's the time...mix in the beans as you add layers of drained rice.
The idea is to create a cone shape of rice, where the rice touches the bottom, but not the sides, of the pot. This doesn't have to be perfect, the idea is to not have too much rice touching the sides because it'll get hard.
When you're done, take the handle of your spoon and poke some holes in the mound of rice. Take 3 or 4 pats of butter and cut each in half. Stick a butter pat half in some of the holes.
Cover the pot tightly and cook for about half an hour. Once it gets going...a lot of steam coming up, and you feel the bottom is cooking...you can reduce the heat some to keep the bottom from burning.
When the rice and herbs are cooked through, you can also keep it hot for quite some time on a low flame if you're not ready to eat it yet.
The classical way to eat this stuff is to spoon the rice out on a platter, fluffing it up as you go. Get all the loose rice out that you can, then pop the bottom crust out (if it comes out as one piece, bonus) and serve it on a separate plate.
The next-best classical way is to hold the cover on the pot and shake the pot a few times until you feel the rice-bottom has popped loose. Remove the lid, take a very large plate and put it over the pot. Holding firmly and carefully, invert the pot on the plate. Lift the pot slowly...all the rice is in a mound on the plate with the crust, or "tah dig," on top.
I don't do either of these anymore. lol I just dish the rice out of the pot, then play around with the bottom to fish out pieces of the tah dig.
 
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