A-N-A-T-O-M-I-Z-E: Uzbek Plov

By Raul Dias

I’m already convinced that I’ve made a total spectacle of myself flailing my arms wildly above my head, trying desperately to draw the attention of any one of the phalanx of supremely busy servers who seem to march past me. Each set of outstretched arms carrying platters of a fragrant dish I had insanely researched that was now in front of me. And when I finally do manage to pin down a particularly dour-faced young man, my assortment of mock equine sounds and riding mimes does zilch to convey to him my predicament…
A little back story first. I’m at the very popular Magistral Plov Center on the outskirts of the city of Bukhara in the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan. I’m here for my first taste of a version of a dish that’s known multifariously all over Asia as palov, polov, polo, polu, pilaf and of course our very own pulao. Here in Uzbekistan, the rice and meat preparation goes by the name of plov and is considered the national dish…nay, obsession!
Now, depending on whom you speak with, it is believed that all the above mentioned iterations originated from the Indian subcontinent. But not many in Uzbekistan are willing to buy into this theory. Indeed, try telling that to my table mates—a gregarious bunch of vodka-quaffing local Bukhari businessmen who seem to have co-opted me into their raucous fold. Never mind the fact that they speak not a word of English, nor I, Uzbek.
Plov itself is a very simple preparation where medium grain rice is first fried in the nutty-tasting rapeseed oil along with onions, garlic, chunks of fatty lamb, golden sultanas and a fistful of sugared yellow carrot juliennes. All this is then stewed along with a generous splash of cumin powder-enhanced lamb stock for hours in a dough-sealed, humungous cauldron called a kazan. A few hours later the head plov maker called an oshpaz breaks the seal to reveal the kazan’s fragrant contents that he then goes on to aerate by separating the meat and rice grains with a large spatula in a cascade of moist yumminess.
Traditionally turned out on a blue and white platter called a lagan from the country’s pottery capital of Fergana, the plov is then studded with boiled chickpeas, pearly white, tiny quail eggs and the reason for my earlier disappointment i.e. the de rigueur horsemeat sausage called kazi that was rather strangely missing from my heaped lagan of plov. Perhaps the servers were under the (erroneous!) assumption that I, as a foreigner, would not be able to appreciate its dense texture and gamey, but supremely divine flavour. Something that I finally got to savour after my ‘nth’ comical Black Beauty impression! 

(An edited, shorter version of this column first appeared in the 6th January 2019 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 8)