Pulao Stuffed Squash
A normal person might dine at a restaurant and have a couple dishes they especially enjoyed. If they were interested in Afghan food, they might go to The Helmand in Cambridge and be impressed by kaddo bourani, a dish of sweet and savory baked pumpkin, and palou kabuli, a heap of basmati rice studded with julienned carrots, raisins, and chunks of lamb. If a normal person were of a culinary persuasion, they might later search for recipes online and try to recreate those dishes. If that person were me, though, and not normal, they might decide to experiment and combine the two into something new. The results aren’t normal either, but they are delicious.
Deconstruction Junction
When considering how to combine these two dishes, my mind went to mahshi,¹ a family of Middle Eastern dishes consisting of vegetables stuffed with rice, tomato sauce, herbs, and ground meat and simmered in broth. You can apply this treatment to a lot of vegetables–zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, and grape leaves, to name a few–so I thought to adapt the dishes from The Helmand into a sort of baked pumpkin mahshi. Just take the ingredients for palou kabuli, swap the lamb chunks for the tomato and ground beef sauce from the kaddo, stuff it in a squash–easier to manage than a full pumpkin–and bake. Seemed easy enough, so I tried that, and it was…fine? It was basically a sound idea, but everything was a little bland and it took forever to cook through. Each element would need to be iterated on to make this a finished dish.
Inside Knowledge
First, let’s consider the filling. Your basic mahshi filling is rice (usually medium grain), tomato puree or sauce, ground beef or lamb, and various herbs, spices, and aromatics. You need enough liquid from the tomato sauce to cook the rice, and the meat is added raw to the filling, which helps hold the whole thing together in an almost meatball-like way.
If we want something closer to a palou kabuli, we need to make some tweaks. We want a looser filling texture than mahshi, so we can start by swapping the medium grain rice with basmati, whose grains remain individual after cooking. Basmati rice doesn’t absorb water in the same way as shorter grain rices, so to make sure it cooks evenly we start by soaking it in water. Soaking the rice also lets us use a bit less tomato than usual, which might otherwise overpower the dish. Browning the ground lamb before adding it to the mixture keeps it from binding the filling together as well as adds some flavor.
As far as other ingredients go, we’re sticking with the carrots and raisins from the original, but I found the batons of carrot distracting in this format, so instead we’re dicing them. A handful of pistachios stirred in at the end gives a bit of crunch. There are no chunks of lamb in this, not because it wouldn’t be good, but because I don’t think you could get them to cook through in the time it takes the rest of the dish to finish. You could probably make it work by par-cooking the meat before stuffing, but that felt a bit too involved. Mahshi is heavy on herbs like dill and parsley, but to bring things closer to an Afghan flavor profile, we replace those with cardamom, cinnamon, and several other spices.
With all that considered, actually preparing the filling is easy. Start by browning the meat, then add onion, garlic, and carrots and saute. Add in the spices to bloom for a few seconds, then add crushed tomatoes, raisins, pistachios, and drained rice. Bring it to a simmer, and you’re ready to go.
Squash and Merge
It would probably be fun to stuff a big pumpkin, but for ease of access we’re using acorn squash instead. To prepare them, first cut off a small slice from the bottom of each so they can sit upright, then cut the tops off and scoop out the insides. The first iteration of this dish just had the rice scooped into the squash and baked, but this resulted in flavorless squash flesh. It would be possible to salt the inside to help fix this, but the grains of salt don’t stick to the outside by themselves. To fix this, we’re using butter.² Just melting some butter and stirring in some honey and salt lets us season the squash, adds some sweetness reminiscent of the original kaddo bourani, and enhances the color of the finished dish.
To fill the prepared squash, just make sure your filling is hot–the dense squash means that it takes a while for heat to penetrate to the center, so starting with a hot filling helps things cook more quickly and evenly–and leave about an inch of room in each squash to allow the rice to expand as it cooks. Place the tops of the squash back on and bake for one and a half to two hours, or until the squash is tender and the rice is cooked through.
Play Around
- You could adjust the filling to have the flavor profile of other rice dishes. Biryani? Saudi Arabian kabsa? Halal cart chicken and rice? Minnesota wild rice stuffing? The possibilities are endless.
- You can pretty trivially make this vegetarian by leaving out the ground lamb; you’ll probably only have enough filling for 6 squash. I probably wouldn’t try to add mushrooms or anything to replace it. Making it vegan is a bit harder since you’d have to replace the honey butter glaze; I think granulated sugar and a plant-based butter could work, but something like olive oil wouldn’t dissolve the sugar, so you’d either need to use another liquid sugar (pomegranate molasses?) or apply the granulated sugar to the inside of the squash with the salt. Omit yogurt sauce (unless you think vegan yogurt would work; I’ve never had it).
- If you did want to make this as one big stuffed pumpkin, this Armenian ghapama recipe by Andrew Janjigian at Serious Eats seems like a good starting point for your experiments.
Notes
- Similar to dolma, sarma, cabbage rolls, and a whole extended family of stuffed vegetable dishes.
- You can fix a lot of things by adding butter.
Pulao Stuffed Squash
Prep List
Equipment
Procedure
| Ingredients | Preparation |
|---|---|
|
1 cup basmati rice |
1. Place rice in a small bowl and rinse several times, until water is mostly clear. Cover rice with cool water and leave to soak while your prepare the rest of the filling. Preheat oven to 350°F/175°C. Line sheet trays with aluminum foil or parchment paper. |
|
1/4 tsp ground black pepper 1/2 tsp ground cumin 1/8 tsp ground cloves 8 green cardamom pods, lightly crushed 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon 1/4 tsp ground coriander 1/8 tsp ground nutmeg 1/2 tsp Aleppo chili flakes 1/2 tsp granulated sugar |
2. Combine spices and sugar in a small bowl and set aside. |
|
1 Tbsp neutral oil 1 lb ground lamb Kosher salt |
3. Heat oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add ground lamb, season with salt, and cook until browned. |
|
1 medium yellow onion, diced |
4. Remove lamb from pan with a slotted spoon, keeping any fat in the pan. Add additional oil if pan is dry, then add onion and saute until golden brown. If bottom of pan threatens to scorch, add a splash of water and scrape up darkened bits. |
|
3 cloves garlic, minced |
5. Add garlic and cook until aromatic, about 30 seconds. Add spice mixture and saute another 30 seconds. |
|
8 oz. can tomato puree or sauce 1 cup chicken stock or water 2 medium carrots, diced 1/2 cup raisins 1/2 cup shelled pistachios, roughly chopped |
6. Stir in canned tomatoes, stock or water, carrots, raisins, and pistachios, bring to a simmer, and cook for five minutes. Taste and adjust for seasoning, then remove from heat. Pour off water from rice and add to meat mixture. |
|
1 stick (1/2 cup, 113 g) butter 4 Tbsp (84g) honey 1 Tbsp kosher salt |
7. While filling simmers, melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir in honey and salt and set aside to cool slightly. |
|
8 acorn squash |
8. For each squash, cut a thin slice off the bottom so it can sit upright. Cut about 1 inch off the top, reserving lid, and scoop out and discard the seeds and stringy flesh with a spoon. Arrange on two parchment- or foil-lined baking sheets. Using a pastry brush, liberally brush each squash inside and out with honey butter, including the lids. Stir any remaining honey butter into filling. |
| 9. Fill each squash with rice mixture, leaving about 1 inch of space at the top of each to allow room for the rice to expand as it cooks. Bake for 1 1/2 to 2 hours or until squash is very tender and rice is cooked. Let rest 5 minutes before serving. | |
|
1 cup plain yogurt 3 cloves garlic, minced Kosher salt |
10. While squash bakes, combine yogurt, garlic, and salt in a small bowl and refrigerate until needed. |
| 11. To serve, place each squash on a plate and remove lid. Using a paring knife, slice each squash into six or eight wedges. Nudge the wedges apart and use the tip of the knife or a fork to fluff rice. Serve with yogurt sauce. |
Notes
If you don't want to make all 8 squash at once, make only half the honey butter and yogurt mixtures and freeze half the filling for later. Let thaw overnight in the refrigerator before using with another half batch of honey butter and yogurt sauce.