Recipes
If you only learn one Persian recipe, learn this one. Chelo — plain saffron-steamed basmati — is the canvas every other Persian dish gets painted on. Kabobs sit on it. Stews drape over it. Yogurt scoops onto it. And buried at the bottom is the tahdig: a slab of golden, crackling rice
Recipes
You've seen this rice. Long-grain basmati, half white and half deep saffron-gold, scattered with ruby-red barberries that look almost too jewel-like to eat. It's the rice on every wedding table, every Nowruz spread, every Friday lunch where the family is gathering. Zereshk Polo ba Morgh — barberry
Recipes
If you've made our classic Koubideh a few times and you're ready to play with the recipe, this is where to start. Tabrizi-style Koobideh comes from northwest Iran — Azerbaijani-influenced, peppery, with chili flakes (Aleppo or Marash if you can get them) worked into the meat. The
Recipes
There's a reason every Persian kabab plate has a bowl of yogurt next to it. The grill gives you smoke, salt, and char. The yogurt gives you everything you need to come back from it — cool, tangy, herbal, and just thick enough to scoop with bread. Mast-o-khiar (literally
Recipes
Every Persian kabab dinner ends the same way. The skewers come off the grill, the platter empties, the tea comes out — and then comes sholeh zard, the saffron-gold rice pudding that's been chilling in the fridge since morning. It's a quiet dessert. It doesn't
Recipes
Thinner than you think. Faster than you'd guess. Better than what you'll get at most kabab houses. Barg kabab — barg means leaf — is lamb (or sometimes beef) filet, butterflied paper-thin, marinated in saffron and onion, and grilled fast over high heat. It's the third
Recipes
Soltani means "of the sultan." When you put koubideh, jujeh, and barg on the same plate, you've earned the name. A Soltani isn't a recipe so much as a logistics challenge. Three kababs, three marinades, one grill, and a table full of people who
Recipes
Every Persian kabab platter at every Persian restaurant in the world has a grilled tomato on it. Most people leave it on the plate. Most people are wrong. A properly grilled Persian tomato is half side dish, half sauce — when you crush it onto your rice with the back of
Recipes
Most people who order Persian kabab in America never realize that the pile of raw onion + red powder next to the meat is doing the heavy lifting. This is the recipe nobody publishes because it's barely a recipe. But it's why your homemade Persian dinner tastes
Recipes
Saffron, lemon, onion, yogurt. Four hours in the fridge. Twenty minutes on the grill. If koubideh is the kabab everyone knows from the menu, jujeh kabab is the one Persians actually make at home most often. It's chicken — easier to source, easier to cook than lamb, friendly to
Recipes
Persian recipes and tools from an Iranian-American family. There's a moment in every koubideh failure where you know it before it happens — the meat sags, slips, falls into the fire. You've seen it on every cooking blog that calls itself authentic and uses 5/8-inch skewers.