Tsunami's Hungry

I’ve never been a huge fan of famous Iranian dishes like Kabab Koobideh and Ghormeh Sabzi. It’s not that I don’t like them – but rather that it’s so easy to find them that I’m never really excited to have them. That’s not the case with Tahchin, what is best described as a “moist, tangy, soft (yet with a nice crunch) and flavorful rice cake”. Today I tried making it using my mum’s recipe.

Ingredients

• 2 legs of chicken (this was roughly 1.2 kg if that helps
• 1 carrot, 1 bell pepper, 1 celery stick, 5 cloves of garlic, 1 onion, 1 bay leaf (solely for poaching the chicken)
• salt (ingredients not exact, see instructions)
• 2 tsp pepper
• 1 tsp turmeric
• Greek Yoghurt OR Labneh¹ (ingredients not exact, see instructions. If buying, get more than 500 g)
• saffron (not exact unfortunately, but this all depends on how potent your saffron is, how much color you want to give the dish)
• 1 egg
• (Optional) garlic and onion powder
• Neutral oil (e.g. sunflower)
• 4 teacups of rice²
• 1 teacup dried barberries (can be found in most Iranian grocers, known as zereshk)
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• Butter
• Cinnamon powder

Instructions

Preparing the chicken

• Roughly chop the vegetables and bring to a boil with salt (1 tsp, but can be adjusted to taste), pepper (1 tsp) and turmeric (1 tsp). Boil until the chicken is fully cooked (you can tell when it starts to fall apart from the bone)
• Remove the chicken meat from the bone, but don’t shred it. Save the broth for soup³ or bin it
• Add some saffron strands into a mortar and pestle, add some 50 ml cold water and crush until you have saffron water. This should look red.
• Add 1 tbsp of the saffron water into a bowl, alongside 2 big tablespoons of greek yogurt, some cinnamon (this is mainly to remove the smell of the chicken/rice. Add a small amount only. We don’t want the mixture to taste like cinnamon!)
• Keep the chicken in the fridge to marinate. Ideally 24 hours.

Preparing the rice

• Rinse your four cups of rice. Note it will be impossible to get this to be fully clear, but rinse as much as you have patience
• Add to a pot with cold water, salt enough that the water tastes like seawater, and bring to a boil
• Once the rice is semi-hard, drain it using a colander and pass cold water through it
• While the rice is cooking, add some 4-5 big tablespoons of the greek yoghurt to a bowl
• Add the egg, some more saffron water (to give it a strong yellow color), 1 tsp salt and 1 tsp pepper. Here you can optionally add garlic/onion powder
• Add 4 tablespoons of the oil
• Mix thoroughly. It has to be a strong yellow color. Add more saffron water if needed
• Add the cooled rice to the mixture and mix well. Don’t add ALL the rice, add enough so that the mixture is not liquidy. The remaining rice we’ll add at the end to have a layer of normal rice
• Your rice mixture should now be ready

Putting it all together

• In a pot, add enough oil to have a ~ 3mm layer of oil at the bottom. Add 2 tablespoons of butter, let it melt (do this at a very low temp, 1 or 2 on an electric stove should be good)
• Add your yoghurt-rice mixture to the pot. Until fully covered. Flatten the top.
• Add the yoghurt-chicken mixture on top
• Now sprinkle the remaining rice until the chicken is fully covered, then flatten the top again.
• Add a lid to the rice. Once the pot starts to steam, remove the lid, cover it with a kitchen towel, put the lid back on the wrap the ends of the kitchen towel onto the lid. This is to absorb moisture.
• Leave this on low heat (1 on the electric stove, any more and you may risk burning! Like me :() for around 45 minutes. Do check how it is doing every 15 minutes in case you need to take it out sooner!
• Once you’ve taken it off the heat, you need to flip it. The trick is to put a large tray/plate on top of the pot, then flip the pot quickly. The tahchin should turn out fine.

Preparing the Zereshk garnish

This bit is optionally, but I HIGHLY recommend it.

• Soak the cup of barberries, then rinse them. This is to remove any sand/stones that may come with the barberries
• Heat some oil and 1 tbsp of butter in a pan, add the barberries and 1 tablespoon of sugar
• Cook the barberries on low heat until they start bubbling, at this point add 1 tbsp of the saffron water and simmer for a bit more. Remove off the heat and let cool
• You end up with a nice sweet and tangy garnish for your rice! Highly, highly, highly recommend.

My Attempt

Unfortunately, I burnt the tahchin! I forgot to check how it is doing and at 45 minutes it was already too late. I managed to salvage as much of it as possible… luckily while eating I didn’t get much of the burnt flavor but it didn’t look the best.

On flavor, I personally found that it lacked salt, and that it was a bit dry. My mum really liked it though, and so did my sister. That said, it worked like magic with the barberries and the mast-o-esfenaj!

In my view, there’s no point bothering with the plain rice bit at the bottom. When I make this next time I’m definitely going all in with the tahchin.

On the dryness, I’m not sure how to solve it without adding more fat… to a recipe that already has so much fat! The only other thing that comes to mind is maybe using half cooked chicken instead of fully poached? However I also don’t want to risk the rice turning out soggy. It’s something I’ll have to try and see, in addition to:

• Using labneh instead of yoghurt: I prefer the tahchin more tangy!
• Figuring out how to salt the chicken better
• Dispersing the zereshk in the rice
• Experimenting with some form of flaked almonds and pistachios as a garnish

1. I made this using greek yoghurt. I would suggest using labneh if you want to make it extra tangy ↩︎
2. Typically Basmati rice is used. I personally prefer something more starchy like Kamfirouz rice. This might be hard to find, I suspect risotto rice or sushi rice should work as a substitute, but I have yet to experiment with this ↩︎
3. My mum typically blends it at this point and adds it to a freezer bag, then freezes it. You can store this for months, and it always makes for a very tasty and quick soup base ↩︎