Rice Pilaf
Rinse the rice, toast it in butter until the grains look glassy, then leave it alone. Every stir releases starch and turns pilaf into risotto.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 25 min
- Resting
- 10 min
- Total
- 45 min
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Milk
- Nuts
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Rice
To finish
Method
Rice
Rinse the rice in a sieve under cold running water, stirring it with your fingers, until the water runs clear — about a minute.
That cloudy water is loose surface starch. Left on, it is what makes rice claggy in a covered pot.
Melt the butter with the oil in a pan with a tight lid and cook the onion gently for 8 minutes, until soft with no colour.
Add the cinnamon, cardamom and bay leaf and let them sizzle for a minute.
Add the drained rice and stir it in the fat for 2 minutes, until every grain is coated and they look glassy at the edges rather than chalky white.
That toasting is what pilaf is. Coating each grain in fat before liquid arrives keeps them separate, and it is the difference between this and boiled rice with things in it.
Pour in the hot stock, add the salt and stir once to level the rice.
Bring to a boil, put the lid on and turn the heat as low as it will go.
Cook for 12 minutes without lifting the lid or stirring. Every stir releases more starch, and a stirred pilaf is a risotto.
Take it off the heat and leave it, still covered, for 10 minutes. This is when it finishes and the grains separate.
To finish
Fork it through gently, fish out the cinnamon stick, cardamom pods and bay, and fold in the almonds, sultanas and parsley.
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What to expect
- Taste
Mild and buttery with a warm perfume from the cardamom and cinnamon, and sweetness from the sultanas against it. It is deliberately quiet, because it exists to sit beside something loud.
- Aroma
Cardamom, which is the dominant smell, over butter and toasted rice.
- Texture
The point: separate, distinct grains with a little bite, against the crunch of almonds and the chew of dried fruit.
- Sound
None.
- How the flavour moves
Butter first, then warm spice, then sweetness at the end from the fruit.
- Serve it
Hot.
- Goes with
A curry, a tagine, grilled lamb, or a stew with plenty of sauce. It is a side dish and is content to be one.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner, with one instruction that is about restraint.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A pan with a genuinely tight lid.
- When to make it
Alongside anything with sauce.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
Small holes across the surface when the lid comes off, and grains that are separate rather than clumped.
- And it feels like
Individual grains, dry to the eye and tender to the bite. Anything sticky means it was stirred or over-watered.
- Food safety
Cooked rice is the one thing here worth being strict about. Bacillus cereus spores survive cooking and multiply in rice left at room temperature, so cool leftovers within an hour, refrigerate promptly, keep no more than a day, and reheat once until piping hot throughout.
- Where it goes wrong
- Not rinsing, which leaves surface starch and makes it claggy.
- Stirring during cooking, which is the definition of the wrong technique.
- Lifting the lid to check, which lets out the steam doing the work.
- Two-to-one liquid, which is a rice-boiling ratio and gives wet pilaf here.
- Skipping the ten-minute rest.
- A loose lid, which lets the steam escape.
- If it does go wrong
Sticky: it was not rinsed, or it was stirred. Hard in the middle: 60ml more hot stock, lid back on, 5 minutes on the lowest heat. Wet: it needed the covered rest. Catching on the base: the heat was too high; a heat diffuser or a folded tea towel under the pan helps.
- Making it ahead
Poorly, and the food safety note is the reason. Cook it fresh.
- Keeping it
One day in the fridge, and no longer — see the food safety note.
- Reheating
Once only, with a splash of water, covered, until piping hot all the way through.
- Freezing
Freezes well in a thin layer and reheats from frozen, which is safer than refrigerating it for days.
- Leftovers
Fried the next day with an egg, having been cooled and refrigerated promptly.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly; the liquid ratio holds. Use a wider pan rather than a deeper one.
- Substitutions
Any long-grain rice; basmati is the best and the most forgiving. Barberries instead of sultanas are sharper and more Persian. Vegetable stock keeps it vegetarian.
- Dietary swaps
Contains milk from the butter and nuts from the almonds, plus celery and sulphites from shop stock. Leave the almonds out and it is nut free; use oil instead of butter and it is dairy free and vegan with vegetable stock.
- Shopping for it
Whole cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks from an international grocer, where they cost a fraction of supermarket jars.
- Keeping the cost down
Cheap. Basmati is worth buying in a large bag.
- Sustainability
Rice is the one staple here with a genuine climate cost of its own: flooded paddies produce methane, and rice accounts for a meaningful share of agricultural emissions worldwide. That is not a reason to avoid it — it feeds more people than any other crop — but it is worth knowing, and it is an argument for cooking the amount you will actually eat rather than a large pot that gets thrown away. The safety limits on storing cooked rice make waste more likely here than with almost anything else, so measuring properly is the useful discipline.
- Nutrition
Mostly carbohydrate, with the almonds adding fat and protein.
- Worth it?
Rinse it and then leave it alone. Two instructions and one of them is doing nothing.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Persia and Central Asia, spreading very widely.
- Also called
Pilaf, pilau, pulao, polow, plov, pilav — the same word travelling.
- Said out loud
PEE-laf or pih-LAF; plov rhymes with 'of'.
- What the name means
From Persian polow via Turkish pilav, and ultimately probably from a Sanskrit word for boiled rice.
- History
Pilaf is one of the great migratory techniques of world cooking. The method — rice coated in fat, cooked in a measured amount of liquid under a tight lid, and rested — appears with local variation from the Balkans through Turkey, Persia and Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, and each region has its own name and its own defining additions. The Uzbek plov, which this site also has, is a substantial one-pot dish with meat and carrots; this is the plainer side-dish end of the same family.
- Why it matters
Enormous across a very wide region, and often ceremonial — plov in Central Asia is cooked in vast quantities for weddings and celebrations by specialists.
- When it is eaten
Any meal with a sauce that needs something to sit on.
- The traditional way
Coating the grain in fat before liquid, cooking covered without stirring, and resting off the heat.
- How it changed
Very little. It is one of the more stable techniques in cooking.
- Regional variations
This site has Plov, the Uzbek version, which is a main course with lamb and carrots and a very different dish despite sharing the name and the method.
- How this version differs
It is the plain aromatic side rather than any specific national version, and it says so rather than claiming a country.
- Sources and credit
None. This technique is older than attribution.
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