Plov

Plov is the rice dish of Uzbekistan and the wider Central Asian table: rice cooked in a kazan over a base of lamb or beef, onions and a great deal of carrot, fried in fat and seasoned mainly with cumin, with whole heads of garlic, chickpeas, barberries or raisins buried in it depending on the city. Every region claims its own version and they differ in ways locals argue over: Tashkent plov uses yellow carrots and a darker, browner base, Samarkand plov is layered and never stirred so the rice, carrots and meat arrive as separate strata, and Fergana plov is made with devzira, a reddish, high-starch local rice that holds its shape under long cooking. The dish is cooked outdoors in enormous quantities for weddings and funerals, usually by a man whose only job is plov, and the morning plov centres in Tashkent serve it from a single kazan to hundreds of people before noon.