Ask any Iranian mother and they’ll tell you ingredients of traditional recipes must never be substituted. As fond as I am of my mother and grandmother, when I moved to Europe, I had to stray from tradition. The methods I developed made cooking fast and simple, using few ingredients. Using tinned ingredients was highly frowned upon in our household, considered lazy and testifying a lack of taste.
But there is much more to life than spending hours in the kitchen preparing a single meal. And so I began breaking the rules of Persian cuisine. For the past years I have been experimenting, tweaking and developing recipes reflecting the simple approach to food, applied to the traditional Persian meals I grew up eating. This is a result of that journey: an easy-going, stripped-down take on Persian food using few ingredients and knowing when it is okay to stray from the rulebook. It is possible to cook, share and enjoy traditional Persian food with minimal effort.
