Albaloo Polo ba Gusht Ghel Gheli
Albaloo Polo (Sour Cherry Rice) is another flavorful and delicious #Persian dish made with #sourcherries !
This rice is so tasty and colorful and can be made sweet or sour/sweet. The top can be decorated with slivered pistachio and almond as well. I didn’t have any available to use for mine, but I have included a picture that I found on the internet from an awesome chef, including the link for the source.
https://thecaspianchef.com
During cherry season in Iran we always purchased lots of sour cherries, cleaned and removed the seeds and kept it in the freezer for winter cravings of Albaloo Polo 😊. So my job was to help removing the seeds and I would eat too many that eventually would get a stomachache. I always have too much fun with sour cherries, even as an adult. So the other day when I was cleaning the cherries to make jam and freeze some this happened 👇🏻.
In my opinion sour cherries can bring so much flavor to any dish if there are cooked right.
Also #Onion the King of flavor in the other hand plays a big role in all the #Persian cuisine of course.
So for my Albaloo Polo I decided to sauté 1.5 large size onion and then by bring the flavor out by adding butter. After that I added the cherries, 1 tsp of sugar and saffron to create this heavenly sour cherry sauce to make the rice (polo). This sauce is not only tasty but very gorgeous as well, because of all the natural ingredients.
This rice can be made with chicken or ground beef, but using the meatball style meat is more traditional. The meatballs for this dish should be smaller than regular meatballs and to make a perfect and professional looking Albaloo Polo is the best to get them as round and same size as possible. Mine don’t look as good since my meat wasn’t cold when I started to roll.
The #tahdig for this rice is a bit tricky, but gorgeous color. I used some of the sour cherry juice to get this color. You need to use a lower temperature compare to the other tahdigs and cook it for shorter period of time otherwise it will burn.
Serving 4-6
Prep and cook time 1 hour
Ingredients:
Sour Cherry (cleaned and without seeds) 2 cups (400g)
Onion 2
Ground beef 250g
Basmati Rice 1.5 cup
Spices:
Salt 2 tsp (1 tsp for ground beef)
Turmeric 1.5 tsp (1/2 tsp for ground beef)
Black pepper 2 tsp (1 tsp for ground beef)
Cinnamon a pinch
Prepared saffron 2 tsp
Sugar 1 tsp
Oil enough
I have prepared this amazing step by step tutorial which you can use for directions. Just sit, relax and enjoy.
