Choosing products for cooking pilaf
The main ingredients of any pilaf are rice andmeat. This is what you should focus on when buying food. If the recipe for the desired dish requires a certain type of rice or meat, then you need to buy them. In all other cases, you need to follow the following rules: rice for pilaf should not be fragile, there should be no crumbs or dust from the cereal in the package. It is best to choose rice with elongated, yellowish and slightly transparent grains. White and roundish grains often have a high starch content and stick together and boil over when cooked. Such cereals are good for porridge. If the package says Parboiled, it means that this rice is steamed and will be bland and tasteless in pilaf, but the dish will be crumbly. As for what meat is preferable for pilaf, everyone knows that it is lamb. However, other meats will also do: pork, beef, veal, chicken, turkey. Often the recipe for the dish specifically indicates which one to buy. When choosing meat, you need to pay attention to its color, smell, and the presence of dark spots. Every housewife knows how to distinguish a fresh product from a spoiled one: you need to press your finger on a piece of meat and see how quickly the hole levels out. With a fresh product, this happens almost immediately. However, in the store, pieces of meat are often sold deeply frozen. Therefore, the expiration date indicated on the package should be the selection criterion here. The recipe for the selected dish will tell you what seasonings and spices are needed for pilaf. Most often, cumin, including black, barberry, black and red ground pepper, bay leaf, curry are used. The finished dish is sprinkled with various herbs: basil, cilantro, marjoram. In some cases, dried fruits are added, if the pilaf recipe provides for this. To prepare this dish, you will need onions, carrots, garlic, tomatoes. Regardless of the type of cookware used to cook the pilaf, a cauldron or a steamer, the composition of the ingredients remains the same.
Cooking pilaf in a multivariate
Prepare a tasty and healthy steamed dish,having such equipment as a multicooker, it is simple and fast. This device has different cooking modes, the number of which depends on the model of this miracle technology. If there is no "Pilaf" mode, you can cook in the "Baking" mode. You will also need the "Frying" and "Steamed rice" modes. A multicooker is a device consisting of a bowl of a certain volume with a non-stick coating, heating elements, an electronic control unit and a tightly closing lid. Pilaf in a multicooker can be cooked in two ways. Classic recipe First of all, you need to prepare the products: wash the meat and cut into medium-sized pieces, cut the onion into half rings, and the carrots into strips. Pour vegetable oil into the bottom of the multicooker bowl and put everything you have cooked in it, that is, meat, carrots and onions. Mix all of this in the bowl. Then set the "Baking" mode, which will last 40 minutes, and periodically open the lid and stir the ingredients. This is how zirvak will be prepared - the meat base of pilaf. After the signal sounds that the "Baking" mode has finished its work, you need to put the washed rice, salt, spices and seasonings in the bowl. Then add boiled water in such an amount that it covers the rice, previously evenly distributed throughout the volume of the bowl, by 1 cm. After this, close the lid and set the "Pilaf", "Baking" mode or another one, which has a cooking temperature of at least 180 °. Simple recipe It is in many ways similar to the first method of cooking pilaf and has only some differences in how zirvak is made. Here, in the "Baking" mode, the meat is first fried for 20 minutes with constant stirring, and the onions and carrots are added later, and the mixture of products is cooked for another 15-20 minutes. Rice, salt and spices are added in the same way as in the first case. The rest of the process is similar to recipe No. 1.
Cooking pilaf in a double boiler
Considering that there are no multicookers in our kitchens yetnot so much, and a steamer is a common thing, then pilaf is most often cooked in it. It is known that this cookware for cooking food on steam has several compartments - bowls that are installed one above the other. Water is poured into the lower compartment, and the upper one is tightly closed with a lid. Dishes cooked in a steamer have a lot of advantages: they are juicy, tasty and retain all their nutritional properties. Steamed dishes are dietary, healthy food. In order to cook pilaf in a steamer, you will need:
- meat (lamb, beef, pork) - 150 g
- rice - 200 g
- medium-sized onion - 1 pc.
- zira, spices, salt
- quince - 50 g
The rice should be sorted, washed thoroughly, changingwater at least 7 times, and soak in boiled water at room temperature for 4-5 hours. The water needs to be salted. At the right time, the meat is cut into portions, which should be rolled in a mixture of spices, cumin and salt. This recipe allows cutting carrots not only into strips, but also into circles. Next, we deal with the quince. You need to take out all the seeds and partitions and cut into thin slices. Then cut the onion into half rings. Water is poured into the lower compartment of the steamer. And the products prepared for cooking pilaf are placed in the upper ones in the following order: meat, quince, carrots. Then you need to lay gauze on top of the products and put the swollen rice on it. You still need to sprinkle it with salted water on top. Then the lid is closed and, if there is a timer, it is set for 2 hours. Periodically, the pilaf needs to be moved (not stirred) with a spatula so that it steams evenly. 15 minutes before the end of cooking, fry the onion cut into half rings in a frying pan until golden brown. Then add it to the pilaf, which is thoroughly mixed.
