#persian-cuisine

#persian-cuisine

Set on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, Perse comes from brother-sister team Farinaz and Farbod Pirshirazi, who built a menu around memories of regional dishes they grew up eating across Iran. While plenty of Los Angeles restaurants tend to focus on kebabs, Perse aims to explore a broader culinary canon of traditional Persian cooking and flavors.

Tahchin is a Persian rice dish in which the rice is mixed with yogurt, oil, egg yolks and saffron and baked until a golden crust forms at the bottom (Persians refer to this as the tahdig). Tahchin is a Persian rice dish. Typically, you'll see it kind of filled or layered with chicken, sometimes spinach greens. My spin on it to make it more of a holiday Thanksgiving vibes is by incorporating caramelized onions, cranberries and rosemary. Look for good quality basmati rice that's labeled sella.

Razavi had been a regular customer at the market ever since he moved to Berkeley in 1976 from his hometown, Yazd, Iran, to attend San Jose State University. At that time, Middle East Market was the only place where Persian and Iranian immigrants could find familiar products from home, including teas, spices, sweets and rice, and it became a cultural and culinary hub for the Iranian community.

The marinade for this grilled chicken recipe, like every recipe in the book, is personal to Nosrat. "If I don't have a deep relationship with it, and I haven't made it countless times over the course of years and years and years," she says, "it wasn't going in the book." It's essentially a descendant of her beloved buttermilk-brined roast chicken -and a tribute to the Persian kebab restaurants she grew up visiting in Southern California. Saffron, onion, lemon juice, tomato paste, black pepper, and yogurt work together to tenderize the meat and create the signature balance of acidity, sweetness, and umami that defines so many Persian chicken kebab recipes.