Plov

Economic context

Plov is prepared at a scale most home cooking never reaches — pots large enough for several hundred guests at weddings, entrusted to professional oshpaz cooks who spend their careers mastering it. That festive, large-batch tradition sits above the cost of an everyday meal, even though the core ingredients (rice, carrots, onion, a portion of lamb) are individually inexpensive and common across Central Asia.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. This figure describes the cost of a healthy diet in Uzbekistan generally — it is not a costing of this specific recipe.

History

Plov is a rice dish simmered with meat (most often lamb), carrots cut into long strips, and onions, all cooked slowly together in a large pot until the rice fully absorbs the cooking juices. Considered the national dish of Uzbekistan, it holds a central place across Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan) as well as in Azerbaijan and parts of Russia and the Caucasus, with every country and city claiming its own regional variation.

Plov is traditionally prepared in very large quantities for weddings, religious festivals and family gatherings, sometimes cooked in pots large enough to feed several hundred guests — a task reserved for specialized cooks in Uzbekistan called oshpaz, who devote their entire lives to mastering this dish. The city of Samarkand claims a particularly renowned version, while Tashkent and Ferghana each defend their own proportions and rice-cooking techniques.

Ingredients — for 8 people

• 600 g (3 cups) long-grain rice
• 600 g (1.3 lb) lamb, cut into large pieces
• 1 kg (2.2 lb) carrots, cut into long strips
• 3 onions, sliced
• Whole cumin, a whole head of garlic
• Oil or sheep-tail fat

Step-by-step Uzbek plov recipe

1. Heat the oil in a large pot and brown the lamb on all sides.
2. Add the sliced onions and cook until deeply golden.
3. Stir in the carrot strips, cover, and let steam for a few minutes.
4. Pour in water to cover, add the cumin and the whole head of garlic, and simmer until the meat is tender.
5. Spread the rinsed rice on top without stirring, adding more water if needed to just cover it.
6. Cover and cook over very low heat until all the liquid is absorbed, then gently fold everything together before serving.

Cooking method

Technique: layered cooking without stirring, with the rice added last and slowly absorbing all the juices from the meat and carrots.

Traditional equipment: a large cast-iron pot (kazan), sometimes set over an open wood fire for large festive batches.

Benchmarks: never stir while the rice cooks; it must cook by quiet absorption, undisturbed, to stay in separate, well-defined grains.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided by eight servings.

Notable amounts: fiber is high for a rice dish, at roughly 6 g per serving, driven by the full kilogram of carrots. Sodium is not counted here since salt is added to taste rather than by fixed quantity in the traditional method.

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