Looking for Perfect Persian Rice

A few years ago I was in Baku, Azerbaijan, looking for flatbreads. Staying in my hotel were two businessmen who had come up from Iran, partly for work and partly just to have a look around. We ran into each other in a park not far from the hotel, and as we hit it off (talking mostly about food), we started to hang around together, especially in the evening when it came time to look for a place to eat.

These two men, one from Teheran and the other from a town in southern Iran, were incredibly picky about food, and in Baku, they were never satisfied. The bread was lousy, the meat was lousy, but above all else, it was the rice that was, according to them, almost inedible. It was cooked Azeri-style, which is very much like the Persian tradition. But the rice available (at least in the places we ate) wasn’t long-grain fine Persian or basmati style. It was Central Asian medium-grain rice, a little chewier, less delicate, and more sticky than the fluffy rice required by Persian and Azeri tradition. Not having grown up in the demanding Persian tradition, I quite liked the rice dishes. But these men hated them, and when I’d say that I didn’t mind them, or even that I liked them, they would look at me as if I’d admitted to liking maggots.