10 STEPS TO MAKE Persian Meatballs!

Oh look, I'm crushing Stephanie's head. I'm crushing Stephanie's head.

This is the tricky part.

You will— No, no.

Fail.

Fail.

Hi everyone, this is Sina. Today we have two special guests to help us to prepare this dish. This is Aman. He's the chef. As you can see, he's all prepared, dressed up. And we have Stephanie here. A couple months ago, Daniel Hernandez, he requested, "Could you make a Peruvian dish?" I don't even know how to read it. Arroz con pollo. There you go. But I mistakenly read Persian dish. So I asked Ahmad if he wants to be in the video with me to make a Persian dish. So here we go. Yay!

I'm very happy to be here with the Chef Nina, and we're gonna make some giant meatballs, giant Persian meatballs. It's called koofteh Tabrizi, which Tabriz is a city in northern part of the country, and people over there really love it and they make it all the time. My dad is actually from a region around there, and he definitely loves this one, this particular dish very much. It's not something that you can find in every Persian restaurant. Usually they make it in households and like really traditional places, but nonetheless, it's one of the best and most tasty dishes. So you're gonna like it. Are we ready?

Yes!

Yes!

The main and the most important ingredient is a kind of vegetable that we call garden savory or summer savory. So I have the dried version of it over here because I couldn't find the fresh ones. So just, let's go with 2 tablespoons. You hold the spoon, I'll pour it. The order of mixing things would be meat, the cooked things, the split peas, and the rice, and Then everything else comes after. So we're just going for cooking this halfway through, not all the way. This is yellow split peas. It's very important to get the yellow ones. So what we need is 1 full cup of cooked split peas. This doubles in size when you cook it, so what we do is just take half a cup. First, you want to get a big plate. So these always have little stones in it, so what you do, you just put it in here and just take the imperfect ones out. That's not a stone, is it?

It's not a stone, but an imperfect one as well as the stone.

So this just gives you some way of, you know, looking at every single one of these really quick. Some people rinse it, some people don't. Yeah, so you can just swirl a little water and then empty that and then put some water back in.

How much water?

So you want to have about 1 inch of water standing on top of it.

Is this an inch?

This is a little less than that, it's like centimeters.

Yeah, that's like it.

All right, so it should be Actually add a little bit of salt, swirl it, and you're good. Next one, we want to cook the rice. What we need is a little over half a cup of cooked rice.

So we're gonna use this rice cooker to cook the rice. Half a cup of rice, dump it in here, and then 3 times of water?

Uh, 3— 2 times water over that, or 3 times.

Do you want salt in there? I do want salt in there. How much?

How much salt? I'm massaging the ground beef.

The meat gets more massages than I do.

I tried to remember last night, but when I came home, I totally forgot about it. We have to make 2 hard-boiled eggs.

Oh, these are both parsley.

No, one is cilantro. This is cilantro.

Organic Italian parsley and curly parsley.

Oh my God, I picked the wrong one.

But it's okay, as long as we have The garden, for the summer savory, it's gonna work.

I love cilantro. The key thing is you have to read the label.

Okay. Okay.

So what we want is all together we want about 2/3 of a cup of vegetables. So here we have some garden savory. Daniel Hernandez, we're making this for you.

Chicken with rice. So we're making Persian pickles.

So if you have a request that you want Nina to make next, leave it in the comments below and we'll do something totally different. But we'll give you a shout out on the video.

We're getting to shred this.

Shred what?

Shred the onion. So what we do, just cut the tip of it and then this end. Keep this tail of it on place. Yes, don't cut it. Don't cut that part.

Don't cut this part?

Don't cut it.

Why?

Because when we shred it, we use that as a handle.

So you have to keep the bottom And peel the skin and hold it like this.

You're gonna use the smaller section, the section with smaller holes.

A little more arm strength.

This is my workout for today.

Oh, it's starting to hurt.

10 minutes up, the egg is ready.

Look at the speed difference, man. Holy cow!

What you really need to do is to get rid of the juice. So just hold it with your hand and just let the juice pour out.

Dump it in. Half a kilo of ground beef.

Let's see, how are we doing with the split peas? So we pick one of them out, so, and then you crush it. If it's too hard to crush, this means it's not cooked too well. So this one was too hard, so What we are going to do, we're going to just swirl it a little bit and let it simmer for a little more. We just want to speed the process up so we can put a lid on this. So before mixing this, so we still need the rice. Let's see how the rice is going. Okay, now this one looks actually half cooked, so this is good. It looks really soft and it's really hot.

So, so should we turn it off?

That is good. Yeah, we can turn it off and Add it to the bowl. 2 really full tablespoons should be good.

This is good?

That is good.

1.5 tamarind. The salt and pepper will be to taste.

Chickpea flour as well.

How much?

So let's go with 2 tablespoons. So go generous. Very important to mix it really well. It has to come to a really nice paste. This seems to be ready. So it's nice and soft and you can easily crush one. So what we need to do with this is to take 1 full cup of this and crush it with the Persian crusher.

That's the official name.

That is the official name. We call this "gushkub," which means meat crusher. Gushkub.

Huh?

Gushkub.

Gushkub.

Means meat crusher.

Yeah.

Nina's struggling, she's handing off to Stephanie.

This is supposed to become a powder?

It looks good actually right now.

I like the Persian Crusher.

So depending on how big a pan is, you put the oil according to cover it?

To cover all the bottom of it and just to cook 2 full tablespoons of tomato paste in there. This is a big pan, so that's good.

Okay, so about 1.5— no, about 1 tablespoon.

Oh, this is more than 1 tablespoon.

Is this more than 1 tablespoon?

Yeah, I think this is. Should we bet that? Yes.

So when the oil is warm, you could add the tomato paste. We go too generous.

Just lay it around to get fried. Shimmy while doing that. Actually, shimmy is an important part of Persian dance, so that goes well. Shimmy and the Persian dance.

I feel like you can move the spoon, right?

You can move the spoon like that. So we're doing this only for taste because when it's fried, it gives a little bit of flavor. As soon as just bubbles for like 1 or 2 minutes, then we can start adding water. So what you want to do is to add enough water Over half of your meatballs are going to be floating in the water.

Should we put it in now?

Pour it in.

Okay, let me do it.

No, no, no, I can do it.

I can do it. Put the heat up until the soup, the water is boiled.

Is boiled, and then turn down the heat.

Toby likes that snapping.

So while that's starting to boil, what we're gonna do is to peel and shell the eggs, crush the walnuts. Not all of them.

Crush it with the Persian crusher?

You can do it with the Persian crusher. This much should be enough. Just break it into small pieces, like, uh, as big as this, would be good.

So what do we do now?

So we need 2 eggs to go in there. It's gonna come out to 6 to 8 meatballs. We want to cut 8 pieces. Everything is ready now. We are at the moment that we've all been waiting for. Here what we have is the berberis, the almond, and onion, fried onion, and the walnuts. And these all are going to go inside the meatballs. So are we ready for this?

Yes.

First of all, you have to make sure your hands are washed. So we got the water running a little bit so that we can, if needs be, we can have some water on our hand to avoid having the meatballs getting stuck into our fingers. So you want to get as big as of a medium-sized lemon in your hand like this. Just make a little hole inside. Now the first thing that goes in is the egg, then we put the walnuts. Fried onion. And the most important part, berbere.

That's the most important?

That's one of the most important.

Which one?

Like a signature taste. So we gotta close it from one side and then turn it around, close it from the other side.

No! Oh my God! So you might touch the boiling water for a fraction of a second.

That's the price you need to pay. Can we just put it in? Oh, it's gonna explode. Maybe you can give it a try. I've never done that.

So what I do, I'll just go like this. Good.

We wait for one side to cook, which takes about 10 minutes, and then we flip it around. After doing this flipping, we just wait for this water to reduce, and then we'll have a little bit of sauce at the bottom, and that's when you're done.

We've fogged up the house.

So the sauce is really thick and nice, so when you pour it on top of the meatball, you'll see it stays up there, and that means this is thick and nice.

The nice one, it's mine. Okay, yes, cracked one is Stephanie's.

No, I think that's from you, Charlie.

No, no, no, all good one are mine.

So we do eat this with bread, but I personally like to just eat it Right, like this. No prep. We go with a little bit of sauce on top. So the way I do it, I put one leaf on each side. A little bit of almond at the top and a little bit of this. Cut in half. Yeah, just go straight down.

Why?

Just to see, to show the middle.

That's really good.

Yeah, that's really good.

So when you put it in front of your guests, as soon as they cut it, they say, "Oh, what a surprise!" Oh, that's interesting, different.

It's really good. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Please leave your requests below. I will try to make it for you.

Believe!

Bye!

The way I do it is I put my flat hand and I put my fingers like this. The middle one is up. So I close this and I pull the index finger out so that I can use it to snap. So with my thumb I'm pushing down, and with this I'm pressing, and with this I'm holding. So as soon as I lift this a little forward, this It's gonna hit the little—

I hurt my finger.

Is this a Persian thing or an Ahmad thing?

It's a Persian thing, yeah.

This is gonna be on Ahmad's CV.

Yeah.

Hello everyone, this is Mina. Today we're gonna— actually, sorry, okay. Today we have a special guest, Ahmad.

No, you gotta do that again. You can't be laughing in the middle of it.

Okay. He requested kimbap.

I want a little bit of sauce.