Uzbekistan | Dimlama

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED

I’d heard of Uzbekistan prior to this project but only as trivia answer about a former Soviet Republic. I did read up on it while researching food but was left with a less than positive impression of it. I’ll leave it at that.

Dimlama is a meat and vegetable stew and seemed like a good meal for a cold winter’s day. It is typically made with lamb but can also be made with beef, which is what I used. In an effort to save money (because beef is ridiculously expensive), I bought a roast and cut it down into stew meat. It was still too dang expensive.

There are quite a few veggies in dimlama and I was able to get all of them, except turnips, at our local grocery store. They had turnips but they were very soft and almost rubbery to the touch. I don’t think that’s how they’re supposed to be. The recipe suggests eggplant as a substitute but I didn’t see any at the store. I think I went shopping on a bad produce day.

There are enough veggies that the turnip won’t be missed. There are onions, carrots, red peppers, tomatoes, cabbage, and a beet. There are also potatoes and garlic.  Prep for dimlama involves a lot of washing, peeling, and chopping and took me the better part of the afternoon. It wasn’t difficult, just time-consuming.

Once everything is chopped, it is layered in a pot in a specific order, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and cumin seeds. After it has boiled for a while, you toss in some bay leaves. It took about 2 hours to cook the veggies all the way through. There was a brief period where the broth took on an unsettling color due to the beet, but it did not end up being pink.

How as it?

Mostly good! My only complaint is the way that some of the red peppers cooked down until they were just strips of red pepper skin and I didn’t enjoy the texture of those. I think a red pepper paste or thicker strips would have worked better.

Would I make it again?

I don’t know. It was a lot of time and effort and a lot of food for one person’s dinner. If I lived with someone who would eat cabbage or beets, I would make it again. I enjoyed it and will gladly eat the leftovers but, it is too much for just me.