Ghormeh Sabzi | Persian herb stew

Ghorme Sabzi or Persian herb stew is undoubtedly the nation’s most-loved dish and there’s no need to discuss the popularity of Ghormeh Sabzi among the Iranian. Hardly ever will you find a person who doesn’t like this stew.

 It is in fact irresistible to say no to this savory flavored mixture of herbs coming along with tender cooked meat and very unique Persian dried limes.

Just to clarify how popular this stew is, I want to let you know that, ironically, the Iranian believe that you have no cooking abilities unless you can cook Ghormeh Sabzi.

Here, we want to teach you how to cook a well-prepared Ghormeh Sabzi dish.

Ghormeh Sabzi

Ghorme Sabzi or Persian herb stew is undoubtedly the nation’s most-loved dish and there’s no need to discuss the popularity of Ghormeh Sabzi among the Iranian.

5 from 10 votes

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Cook Time 3 hours hrs

Course Main Course

Cuisine persian

Servings 6

Ingredients

  

1 kg required vegetables

• 300 grams chives
• 300 grams coriander
• 300 grams parsley
• 100 grams 100
• 500 grams (boned) meat cubes
• 2/3 glass kidney beans
• 5 dried limes
• 1 big onion
• Unripe grape juice as much as required
• Salt, pepper and turmeric, as much as required

Instructions

 

• The night (about 12 hours) before you want to cook this dish, leave the kidney beans in some water so that they will absorb some of it. It’s a good idea to change and replace the water two or three times.
• Dice the onion. Use some oil to stir fry it in a pot. In order to make it look better and more delicious, after they’ve been fried add a little turmeric.
• Cut and chop the (boned) meat cubes and add them to the onions. Fry them until the color of the meat has changed.
• Use a different pot to cook the kidney beans. You don’t need to cook them completely, just cook them until they are half-cooked.
• Add 3 glasses of boiling water to the onion and meat cubes. Cover the pot with its lid. Lower the flame of the gas burner because the meat needs to be cooked over a longer period of time with little heat.

  While the meat is being cooked, wash the vegetables and chop them into small pieces. In a pan, fry them.
• When the meat is half-cooked, separate the water and the kidney beans from each other. Add the kidney beans and the fried vegetables to the meat cubes. Now, we must add the dried limes. But remember, before you add them to the stew, you must pierce them using a fork. After adding the dried limes, pour two or three glasses of water into the pot.
• Almost after leaving the pot on the gas burner for two hours, the stew must be well-prepared. Now, it’s time to add the flavors, salt and unripe grape juice. In order for the tastes to blend, leave the pot on the gas burner for one more hour.

Using the ingredients mentioned here, you can cook Ghormeh Sabzi for 6 people. If you want to prepare a more or less amount of this dish, simply use maths (multiplication and division) to find out how much of each ingredient you need.

Tips for cooking Ghormeh Sabzi

In Persian we have a term as “Ja Oftadan” which is basically a stage after being cooked. In this text I have used the term “prepare” for it. Let me put it like this, when the food is cooked, the taste of rawness is gone. But when it’s “well-prepared”, it tastes heavenly because you can taste a nice blend of different tastes. For Ghormeh Sabzi to be well-prepared, you need to chop the vegetables into really small pieces, or it won’t be well-prepared and it won’t taste as heavenly as it should!

It’s better to use raw vegetables, but if necessary, you can keep raw vegetables in a freezer.

The thing you need to pay attention to when frying the vegetables just like what you do with Khoresh Karafs is that you should add the oil before the vegetables have lost the water in them. If you do this, they will look better in color. Also, do not fry them for a long time because if you do so, they will look darker and lose their properties!

The less water there is in the stew, the more delicious and better prepared it will be.

To make the stew look more beautiful, after you have put out the flame of the gas burner, you can add a few cubes of ice to the stew. If you do this, the fat and oil will move to the surface of the stew which will make it look better.

Oops! My Ghorme Sabzi is bitter, what should I do?

There are times when your Ghormeh Sabzi turns bitter! It often happens, but is there any solution to solve the problem? The answer is “yes”.

What are the reasons for the bitter taste of the stew?

• You might have used fenugreek and the amount was more than enough. Solution: you can add the herb while you are frying the onions and meat, that is when you can control the amount.
• The dried lime can be the one making your stew bitter. Solution: soak the dries limes for hours in the water or remove the seeds.
• Over frying the herbs can cause the bitter taste. Solution: stir fry the herbs as quick as you can.

How can I remove the bitter taste?

If your stew is bitter, use one of the solutions below:

• You can add one or two potatoes to the stew while cooking. It will absorb the bitter taste.
• You can add more herbs except fenugreek to the stew while cooking.
• Add some orange juice. It will be effective for spicy food too.
• You can add some sour grape juice.
• You can add 2 sugar cubes (or 2 teasp of sugar).
• Add one tbsp. tomato paste.
• You can add some fried onions.

Ghorme Sabzi and Its History!

Ghorme sabzi is an Iranian dish, which is about 2000 to 5000 years old! So this is a national food. However, the ingredients used in preparing this dish have always been slightly different all over Iran, the main flavor always remained the same.

The very important point about this food is that it has been always on Persian’s table. An inseparable member of the Persian cuisine. Better to that the name of the dish is made of two parts “Ghorme” and “Sabzi”. Ghorme refers to a special way of keeping meat healthy and sabzi refers to vegetables. As you see, the name completely suits the appearance of the dish ghorme sabzi.