I decided to add this page as I think Iranian culture is not known much by other countries due to the low rate of tourists. To make this page more relevant to myself I try to mostly put photos of foods or things I have made myself.
I enjoy trying new recipes and if I had the chance I would have made a new meal every single day. I also love learning about other countries, and you can find my experiences from other cultures in gallery format under the Travelogue tab.
Here I’ll put photos of the types of food we usually eat in Iran and they might be so similar to other countries. Also, you can find a Persianized variation of normal dishes that I really like. In the culture part, I will explain Persian culture as I have grown up with it, and leave the things I learn from other countries to the Travelogue tab.
Persian culture is full of cooking traditions or using different kinds of food in traditions. For example in Nowruz which is our new year, people go to friend’s and family’s houses and welcome each other with fruits, sweets, and nuts and it is common to drink black tea or herbal tea. For another example, one day of the year is called “Cheragh Barat” and it is a tradition to remember the ones who have passed away. In this day, people go to graveyards and offer other people with dates, candies, chocolates, and foods such as “Aash”. It is believed that the good vibes of doing this passes good energy to the dead’s soul.
Yalda Night
Yalda Night is the longest night of the year, families gather usually in the eldest family member’s house, like the grandmother’s house, and celebrate the night for having the family they love. A table designed with nuts, fruits and anything else depending on the person’s creativity is a tradition in Iran.
Serving Guests in Different Regions
Different regions in the world have their own style of eating food, and in my opinion, the way they serve food to guests is when this difference becomes the most conspicuous. These photos were taken while I was a guest. In the photo in the centre, the stew is “Ghormesabzi khoresht” and rice cooked this way is called “chelow” and the chicken is prepared with tomato paste, as in its usual recipe. The yellow rice dish is “tahdig” which is rice scorched with yoghurt and saffron. Other than the main dishes there are jelly and a typical kind of salad, vegetable and juice. The salad is made of lettuce, cucumber, tomato and carrot. The vegetable plate usually consists of parsley, leek, basil and mint. This table is for a special guest and was being prepared from the early morning or the day before.
The photo on the left though belongs to Gonabad city in Khorasan Jonubi province, containing “Aash Lakhshak” and pan kebab. The bread is called “Sangak” and is baked over small stones in a bakery. The salad is mainly made of pickled cabbage.
The right photo is an egg breakfast served with cheese in an ecology house in Riab village close to Gonabad. This kind of bread is mainly made in this region of Iran and is considered to be a very thick bread in comparison with other types of bread you can find in typical bakeries.
The bowl being served contains “Aash Joosh Pareh”. Aash Joosh Pareh is a traditional food cooked mainly in special regions such as Gonabad, the city I have talked about under the travelogue tab on the Khorasan Jonubi Province page. It contains a kind of thick “Reshteh” called “Lakhshak”. Reshteh is dough, dried in straw shapes. Unlike what is said on websites, Reshteh tastes nothing like noodles. In Aash Joosh Pareh, Lakhshak is wrapped around ingredients such as lentil, sesame, poppy seed, and cannabis seed and then it is boiled with spices such as turmeric. A similar food to this kind of Aash is dumpling. This food is designed with walnut and cumin powder.
Deserts
As each culture has its own food style, I put photos of some of the foods or deserts I find delicious and/or interesting that might be unfamiliar to many people. All the food types here have different recipes from region to region and of course from person to person, so I’ll write the most common ingredients. I have not brought the full cooking instructions as there are so many recipes available online but if anyone is interested I can tell them my own recipe.
These 4 are sweet plates. Halva is frying mainly flour, oil, sugar, cardamom, rose water, and saffron. Ranginak is the same as Halva but dates are used instead of sugar which makes it taste different. Fereni is stirring starch, milk, rose water, cardamom, and saffron or vanilla.
Sholzard is similar to Fereni but with rice added and designed with cinnamon, slivered pistachios and/or almonds. We love Saffron, rosewater and cardamom in our sweets, cinnamon is also popular for doughy sweets like biscuits or cookies. In Iran, there is only a few types of cookies called cookie, all other types have their own names, for example, “Raisin cookie” is called “Raisin Sweet” so it’s considered a sweet and not a cookie. “Rice Bread” is the English translation of “Nan-e Berenji” but it is not bread, it’s another type of cookie. Another thing to mention here is that almost every area has its own type of cookie and some of them are famous like the Fuman cookies belonging to the beautiful city of Fuman. To be honest, I’m not sure what specifies a sweet as a cookie in Persian, and anything that comes to my mind has a counterexample, if you have any suggestions I’ll be happy to know.
The fish-like sweet is made of cotton candy. Here cotton candy can be found as fluffy as the ones sold on stick, but you can mostly find it thicker and packed in different styles in supermarkets. I made this shape for my son’s first birthday party.
Breakfast
These two photos are similar to common breakfasts in Iran, a bit fancier though. Scrambled eggs are mainly cooked with onion, and sometimes garlic, but here it is with cheese to go with strawberry. In a cheese sandwich having cheese, raisin, parsley, and tomato complete each other combining sweet and salty tastes.
Normal Dishes + a hint
In these plates, I used ingredients that might be a bit unfamiliar for people from other countries. I cooked them in Norway, so it was great combining Norwegian Salmon with the taste I like in the background. I used black seeds and fish roe with rice and shrimp which was a good mixture in rice and shrimp plate. Garlic bread, salmon, roasted almonds and parsley was one of my cooking trial and error dishes which ended up very good. Similarly, Salmon went well with mushrooms and tomato, totally salmon goes well with many things. In the saffron chelow & meat plate, I added brewed saffron to the rice while steaming it under a thick-cloth cover in its last stage of cooking. I should mention saffron needs to be brewed before being added to foods. If you simply add saffron to food similar to what is done with other spices it won’t give you the aroma and flavour the way it should in most cases, I say it as many of my international friends didn’t know about it.
Food
These are chosen from Persian cuisine.
Tahchin is when cooked chicken is mixed with yoghurt and saffron and fried on the bottom of the pot in which the rice is cooking.
The middle photo is “Aash Reshteh” designed with “Kashk”, fried onions and pepper. This kind of “Aash contains peas, beans, vegetables and “Reshteh”. Reshteh is tall thin sticks which soften by cooking and are made of wheat flour.
When someone says Pirozhki something like the photo here comes to my mind with ingredients of minced lamb meat, potato, onion, garlic, and maybe bell pepper. There is a jock in Persian that says someone asks an Iranian “how often do you use onion in your food?” The Iranian answers “first we fry the onion then decide what to cook!”
The very green dish of Kookoo Sabzi is made mainly from vegetables of chives, parsley, and coriander, other ingredients are spices such as turmeric or curry, you can add Zereshk and Sumac to give it a bit of sour taste and walnut is a great match with this food.
Nature Gifts
All the items here are common natural gifts in the area I live: northeast of Iran. All the fruits I’m going to talk about in this paragraph have a sour sweet taste, my favourite. It is difficult for me to explain these fruits as even thinking about them makes me wanna have some.
Barberries have a sour sweet taste. Barberries in the photo have 2 forms of dry and fresh, they can also be kept frozen. The barberry juices here are from two different kinds of barberries, one red barberry and the other black wild barberry. Candies are not merely for aesthetics, as the juices here are not mixed with sugar you might need them for drinking such sour juice!
As stated in Wikipedia ” The first true greengage came from a green-fruited wild plum which originated in Iran. ” Many Iranians madly love greengage plums, I guess one of the reasons is the fact that even their ancestors used to eat them, another reason is that we love the sour sweet taste! What’s in the bowl is a very delicious greengage plum jam, I’m not saying it just because I made it myself!
Black mulberry here has 3 forms of raw fruit, jam and condensed juice.
It is very common here to dry sour cherries and eat them as a snack. The other form of sour cherry on the plate is its jam.
Saffron is called red gold in Iran. Iran is the best saffron producer in the world and Qaen city has the best saffron in Iran. I’m proud to say that the second-best saffron comes from the place my grandparents used to live in, Gonabad. The quality of saffron in this region is close to Qaen and our relatives harvest saffron in November. When the saffron flower is ready, you must pick it and separate the petal from the stigma, even one day delay will result in petal withering and a difficult separation task.
I took the Smudge photo on top of a bunch of herbs useful for when you get cold. Smudge is a stick made of herbs and is burned to produce a good odour and of course, unlike other photos here it is not edible. This smudge is made of rosemary and lavender and designed with miniature roses: the herbs I could easily pick in our garden.
Dairies
Once we bought 5 kilograms of milk and I made these products from it. From left to right they are Ghare Ghoroot, Dry Kashk, Strained Yoghurt and the bowl with mints on top contains Persian old-style yoghurt. By heating milk to a certain temperature and letting it in a warm place for a few hours you get old-style Persian yogurt. Mixing yoghurt, water and salt you get Ayran (Doogh) and pressing it in a cloth-like bag gives strained yoghurt. Adding lemon juice to yoghurt breaks it straining this broken yoghurt gives old-style Persian cheese, and if you dry this cheese you get Kashk. Boiling water left from cheese gives you Ghare Ghoroot. I know it might be a bit confusing but my purpose of these explanations is to say how they used to easily use every part of milk in different forms.
7-Seen
Nowruz word means new day and refers to our new year calculated based on the solar calendar. Photos here show 7-seen: it is customary to have a table with 7 elements of apple, vinegar, sumac, green-grown sprouts, Oleaster, Samanu, and garlic and each of them is a symbol for a quality like health, growth and wealth.
Persian names of these elements start with S and each of them brings its own type of good vibe for the rest of the year. Each family designs this table in a different style, so you can imagine a country with millions of types of 7-seen tables, from luxurious ones to very simple ones. Dates in photo captions are solar dates, the system officially used in the Iranian calendar.
I took these photos at the same place they were located in the house to convey the feeling of normal house decoration, and you can find loads of 7-seen photos available online.