All recipes
Recipe
Dimlama
Meat and autumn vegetables stewed slowly in their own juices.
- Time
- 2 h 30 min
- Serves
- 6
The story
Dimlama is a harvest-time dish. The name comes from dimlash — to cook slowly under a lid, in steam. Meat goes into the bottom of the kazan, and on top of it layer after layer of the season's vegetables, finished with whole cabbage leaves. No water is added: the vegetables give up enough juice to cook everything.
It is the easiest of the great Uzbek dishes to make — the work is all in the chopping — and every household does it differently, with quince, turnip or aubergine depending on what the garden gives.
How it tastes
Very tender meat and soft, sweet vegetables in a rich, clear juice, lifted by cumin, garlic and fresh herbs. It tastes of the end of summer.
Ingredients
Serves 6
- 800 g lamb or beef, with some bone, in large pieces
- 100 g lamb fat or 4 tbsp oil
- 3 onions, sliced into rings
- 3 carrots, in thick chunks
- 4 potatoes, halved
- 1 small aubergine, in thick slices
- 2 bell peppers, in wide strips
- 3 tomatoes, sliced
- 1 quince or 1 turnip (optional)
- Half a small cabbage, separated into leaves
- 1 whole head of garlic
- 1 tsp cumin and 1 tsp coriander seeds
- Salt and black pepper
- Dill and basil
Method
- Melt the fat in a kazan or heavy pot and brown the meat briefly on all sides.
- Layer over it the onion, carrots, potatoes, aubergine, quince, peppers and tomatoes, seasoning each layer with salt, pepper and spices. Tuck the garlic into the middle.
- Cover everything with the cabbage leaves.
- Put on a tight lid and cook on very low heat for 1½–2 hours, without adding water.
- Lift out the vegetables and arrange them around the meat on a platter, spoon over the juices and scatter with herbs.
