What Makes Iradi Plov Iradi

TALAS — Ask a visitor from Tashkent to taste Iradi plov and you will probably see a puzzled face. A true plov is made by laying long-grain rice over a base of fried meat, onion and carrot, the zirvak, and leaving it to steam undisturbed so that every grain stays separate. Irad paloosu is stirred. Food writers compare it to risotto.

The difference begins with the rice. Iradi plov is made with the cold-tolerant short-grain rice that Koryo-saram farmers brought to the lower Chu basin after the deportation of 1937. Food historians trace the dish to Chu valley households of the 1950s and 1960s, which found that the sticky local rice turned into a heavy mass when steamed in the plov manner. So they cooked it like a porridge instead. The rice is toasted in the fat of the zirvak, hot meat broth is added a ladle at a time, and the pot is stirred until the grains are tender and bound in a creamy sauce. It is finished with butter or a spoonful of suzma. The name stayed with the dish it replaced.

"My grandmother never called it anything but plov, and she would have been offended if you suggested otherwise," said Lyudmila Tskhay, who teaches cookery at a vocational college in Nurzhan. "But she never once made it with long rice."

The seasoning is local too: wild mountain cumin gathered in the Talas Alatau, often dried barberries, and beef or mountain mutton. Never horsemeat. Served with beet suzma, it remains a household dish for Sundays, name days and church feasts. For weddings and memorials, Iradis still expect the long-grain özbek paloo cooked by men in a cauldron.