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When you are travelling, whether you are a foodie or not, you have to taste local food. How could you go somewhere without trying any local dishes? Trying Persian food in Iran is no exception.

Travel in itself is not a one-dimensional endeavour. It is supposed to be done using all senses and feelings. Giving up on this idea would somehow handicap the full potential of your travel experience. Besides, food is probably the easiest element to experience in a culture. You just have to eat it, let it defy what you had previously known about food, and be awed by the discovery. And in my travels, few foods left me as awed as the Persian food.

There is something truly unique about Persian food. It doesn’t differ from the European foods I’ve tasted simply in terms of ingredients or cooking techniques. What differentiates Iranian cuisine is a paradigm shift in the way you’re supposed to feel tastes. No matter if you are eating a kebab or any of the many stews originating from this country, or any other Persian food for that matter, you simply can’t expect to feel any familiar taste! And there are more than just one reason to try it!

If we are to take a more famous example for comparison, such as the Mediterranean cuisine, foods in Italy, Greece, and Southern France from five hundred years ago were the precursors of what you may taste there today. They were very different from their current form.

If we go even further back we’ll find out we lost countless recipes! It used to be that the ancient Romans served some of their dishes with Garum, a mix of putrefied fish guts and salt and spices (doesn’t it sound inviting?). Before that, the Greeks used to mix their wine, which was more like nowadays Porto than normal wine, with water and honey and spices. In half of Europe the word for the liver is a variation of the Latin word “ficus”, fig, since liver used to be served with a side of figs. Yet, did you ever try any of these things?

The past centuries have transformed the European culinary art in the direction of simplification. This is by no means a bad thing, as it just represents a philosophy of food: nowadays, in most of the world, common practice usually dictates that just a couple tastes are allowed to collaborate or duel in the mouth for the ultimate pleasure of the taste buds. Any diner will thus engage with a well-defined, carefully designed, targeted aroma.

In Iranian cuisine, on the other hand, a dish is not made to please the palate with an easily discernible taste. Sweet and sour, salty, bitter, and umami can all be present in an Iranian dish, and do so harmoniously. Meat, pomegranate, nuts, onion, and butter can easily find their way in one single Iranian dish. As you eat you’ll find out how these tastes come in layers and constantly keep you guessing. Any bite or spoonful is a mix of different proportions of this or that, an alchemy of wildly distinct tastes.

Why?

Because the distinctiveness of the climates and biomes in Iran provides for a huge choice in matter of ingredients. Iran also used to be the first multicultural empire in the history of humanity, and its crossroads position in Asia brought on countless migrations, invasions, and trade routes with yet more ingredients. There is now a myriad of people, even a couple of entire nations inside Iran. True to the rich history of ancient sciences and philosophies that used to travel with these peoples, here foods are classified according to ancient tables, like you would do with alchemy, in cold foods and warm foods. It has nothing to do with the actual temperature of the food, as much as it has to do with the effect that it has on the body of the consumer. Good practice says that at any table the cold foods and the warm foods should be equilibrated, and this tradition, originating probably from ancient Greek medicine over two thousand years ago, is still alive today! Eating Iranian is, in all senses, a jump in the culinary past of our world.

Needless to say, all these factor has make this country the origin of a wealth of different tastes that deserve to be tried. As a fan of Asian food I can tell that, despite it not being famous enough, Persian food has nothing to envy to Thai, Chinese, or Japanese.
Persian food is a culinary rainbow. It is no wonder that it is not possible for me, unless I intended to write a Tractatus, to describe all the delicacies that I have come across. I will nevertheless give you a few examples of things you should definitely try if you go to Iran, or if you stumble upon a good Iranian restaurant (and I strongly encourage you to!).

Kebab

Can’t reasonably start with anything else! Kebab is, of course, the most famous Iranian dish around the world. One could say that it is something that originates in the whole Middle East. While this might be true, the best kebab I have ever eaten was in Iran. Forget the usual roll-up you’re used to in Europe, this is entirely different. It is usually a skewer of either slices of meat or minced meat. It tastes like heaven and is always accompanied by some rice and vegetables, among which baked tomatoes and raw onion, useful for cutting the meaty taste between one bite and another.
The cook may attempt to freshen it up some more by giving you some lime and parsley, or can tradeoff the simplicity of the meat taste for a more intense experience, through marinating the meat and using sauces unlike anything we can think of in Europe.
In any case, I agree with the Iranians’ prideful boast that “You haven’t really tried kebab until you tried the Iranian one”

Rice

Again, I can’t reasonably not continue with rice. Rice is a staple food in Iran, and more often than not everything else is accompanied by it. It is so since the 16th century, when it became widespread among the population, although it is supposed that the Persian rice dishes had been by that time in evolution in the Persian nobles’ kitchens for some seven hundred years already. Iran doesn’t only have some areas very suitable to rice cultivation, such as Gilan, but also access to different types of rice and methods of preparation. This is the consequence of neighbouring other countries that have also been huge consumers of rice. Of particular notice is the fact that Persia has had immense historical cultural contact with northern India, so it is certain that some dishes and techniques relative to the cooking of rice have travelled between the two regions.
Rice can be prepared as chelo, where the rice is boiled a bit and then steamed to make it fluffy. It is simply covered with some spices, saffron, and ready to accompany another food, such as kebab. The other type of rice is polo, where the rice is boiled until all water evaporates, and there are fruits, pieces of meat, or other ingredients boiling with it. This particular type of cooking has become so famous that, through either Turkey or Russia, pilav\pilaf rice is eaten in the traditional cuisine of my very own Romania, in eastern Europe.
Also, regardless of how you cook it, all rice that stays on the bottom of the kettle and becomes crunchy is tah-dig, and it is often fought for by Iranian diners.
Expect saffron, raisins, pomegranate, nuts, olives, cinnamon, and many more ingredients with your rice.

Khoresht

Literally meaning stew, and the most used accompaniment to chelo rice. The greatest variety of ingredients is probably used in the preparation of stews.
If you try Fesenjoon you will taste some chicken with a sauce of pomegranate juice, nuts, and other ingredients which can either make it sweet or sour. If you go for Ghormeh Sabzi you will experience a blend of no less than thirteen types of herbs with just a couple cubes of meat for extra taste and some kidney beans which make it, among other things, very pretty to look at. And there are many, many more! Lamb fat and potatoes, mushrooms and vegetables, prunes and meat, plus innumerable varieties or plays on local ingredients in the various regions of the country. Iranian stews are a world to be explored, and each one of them is delicious for a whole array of different reasons.

Ash

Soup. Again, nothing you might have seen before. Some soups are complex and similar to stews that look like the Hungarian Goulash. Some others are made of just out of a couple of ingredients, such as the one made of only yoghurt, water, and cucumbers. This one is a life-saver on a hot summer day, and my personal favourite. In any case Iranian soups can either be excellent as an entree, or be the whole meal if you just feel a bit peckish. Different assortments are available depending on what you want to eat next.

Yoghurts

Not only used to make tasty soups, as the one mentioned just above, youghurt, it seems to me, is ever present in Persian cuisine in a lot of different roles. After you travel to Iran, I think, all yoghurt-based foods and drinks are the easiest to replicate when you go back home. They do not require a lot of effort or complicated ingredients to make, and certainly deserves your curiosity whether you like dairy products or not.
Doogh is the first thing that needs to be mentioned. It sure is one of the tastiest drinks I’ve had in my whole life. One of the healthiest, too! It is yoghurt mixed with water and aromatic herbs. Drink it with any meal, and it will make a nice contrast with what you’re having. Drink it during a hot day and you’ll feel as fresh as ever, especially if you put some mint inside. Forget Coke! If the world started using Doogh instead of other drinks during meals we’d cut obesity, diabetes, and other diseases out of our lives. Doogh production secrets are the main thing I’m gonna carry back to Italy. Call me a spy if you want. I’m in love with it! Can’t live without it.
Next thing is the yoghurt strained with some herbs, nuts, cucumber, and scallion. This is usually consumed either before or after a meal. Then there’s also the yoghurt with eggplant puree, and many others.
With just a few ingredients and water Iranians can make quite a few varieties of delicious yoghurts that can be drank or eaten before, during, or after a meal.

Ad infinitum

Those above are just the main categories, the most consumed types of Persian food on an Iranian menu. Most Persian foods escape any attempt at categorization. Kuku, Tebrizi Koofteh, Mirza Ghashemi as main or side dishes are just a few examples of such foods in a sea of others. There’s more types of Persian bread than I can remember.There are plenty of types of desserts, such as Koloocheh and Gaz. When you drink tea you’ll be offered saffron rock candy, cinnamon, and other spices to make after your own exotic taste. Salads are made following schools of different countries, such as the Russian style or the French one, but always modified according to Iranian taste. And so it goes…
As I said at the beginning of this article, a whole treatise would be in order to describe it all. Or maybe it wouldn’t be enough. After three months here I can say that I still find new dishes that I hadn’t known or new versions of dishes I had already tried on almost a daily basis. This list could go on ad infinitum.

I suspect that if you’re not Iranian you won’t be able to taste it all. Don’t even try. Luckily that is not a problem!
I can say that, ultimately, Persian food itself did not only impress me because of its exotic tastes. After the first few days in Iran, I was surprised by a trend: every time I’d eat, I’d be surprised by something entirely new to me. And then I have discovered the fact that these dishes have maintained their core preparation methods for hundreds of years. I found out small bits of Iranian ancient culinary philosophy, whose origins are shrouded in mystery. All this made the culinary dimension of my travel an adventure of discovery of this mystical realm. Every time I go to a friend’s house or a restaurant, I know I’ll feel something new. I don’t have to look for it, it just happens to be on the menu.

So if you are planning to travel to Iran, or just have for some time been curious about that Iranian restaurant in your town, don’t hesitate! Go, throw yourself in this experience, and let either luck or curiosity cull you into one of the richest, more ancient culinary traditions in the world. Check out Iran food tour.

And “Bon appetit!”, “Enjoy your meal!” or, should I say, “Noosheh jan!”

“Before going there, I’d had certain preconceptions about the Middle East, mostly derived from the media. Once I arrived, my preconceptions were slowly replaced by reality itself, which proved to be rather less coherent and understandable than what the media had depicted” – Joris Luyendijk

Turn on the TV, turn up the radio, open the newspaper, or more likely look up those sweet funny memes, and you will know for sure all Middle Eastern countries are one hot hell of a mess. War, poverty, famine, disease, sectarianism, religious extremism, totalitarianism, and generally speaking a fogagy, a shapeless amalgam of the worst misfortunes humanity can have, afflict, in the average Westerner’s mind, all countries from Morocco to Pakistan.
It is no wonder then that when I informed my friends and family that I’d travel to Iran I raised quite a few eyebrows and a considerable number of objections, some of which I was low-key obsessed of as well. But, now that I am here things are… normal.

It is nothing like I had imagined!

o I’ve started asking myself why. “Why are there so many misconceptions about the Middle East in the West?”, “Why was I afraid to travel through Muslim countries?”,”Why would my friends think Iran is full of bombs and terror?”

I came, after many hours of thought, to the conclusion that the answer to this misunderstanding of the core of the Muslim world is intertwined with the reasons that lie in the first lines of this article: media depiction. Yet the answer itself felt strange. Wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t the media, usually so divided on domestic affairs, provide distinct opinions about Iran?
So why do they all say the same stories?
Wouldn’t other documents or articles, especially in the Internet era, provide alternative information to what news media report?
So why isn’t there any such readworthy thing?
Wouldn’t members of the society so used to empiricism, such as the European one, avoid to proclaim certainty on something that they didn’t directly experience?
So why are all my friends, and why was I certain about these notorious Middle Eastern misfortunes when they prove to be, in more than just a few cases, false assumptions?

These sure are a lot of questions…

I was short on answers and my knowledge only allowed an incoherent idea of why there is such a huge gap between perception and truth about the countries I had seen in the Middle East.
So I took it upon myself to look for the main reason behind these false assumptions and finally came across something interesting.

In 2006 the Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk published his book “People like us: Misrepresenting the Middle East”. Luyendijk, a veteran correspondent in the Middle East, having worked in an area spanning from Sudan to Iran, exposes the mechanisms of how Westerner’s ideas of the Middle East are shaped by the media.
His work is focused on Arab speaking countries. My experience of the Middle East, on the other hand, is so far is related to only non-Arab countries, and the biggest expectation vs. reality shock I’ve had was in Iran. Now, just to avoid any confusion, as Luyendijk himself tellingly says, people in Iran speak Persian and “you make as good an impression speaking Arabic as you do speaking German in the Netherlands” and “Dutch is closer to Turkish than Arabic is”. Nevertheless, what he explains about the Arab countries can safely be used as a parameter for what happens with regards to media depiction of all Middle Eastern countries.

So, with the help of his and a couple other intellectuals’ eye-opening quotes, I will explain in a few points how we came to the point where we, you included, experience this gross misrepresentation of these countries.

“The news agencies are the eyes and the ears of the world”.
To begin with, the mechanisms through which information is provided to journalists is not what you might think. Every new story is reported to the newspapers by news agencies. These are institutions that have observers worldwide that are tasked with finding what event is newsworthy, to classify news and pass them on to the newspapers and journalists, who in turn produce the actual articles. This has far-reaching implications.
The first is that all the correspondents, whether they are where the news is happening or not, have the same access to information as their colleagues do half a world away. More importantly, their colleagues in the office in London, Paris, etc. get it sooner and thus pick the story the correspondent should work on.
The second implication, consequently, is that correspondents reporting from somewhere are simply there for the show, and have little of their own to add to what you yourself would know if you subscribed to the news agencies.

This explains why the news we hear about the Middle East in the West are always the same even if reported by different newspapers: their core stories are provided by the same agencies.

“News is also a kind of show business”
This is a big one!
A newspaper’s survival depends on how many people’s attention it can command. Attention is, so to say, a newspaper’s currency, and the main means to profit for its owners. So everything, from what is considered newsworthy, to the news’ placement in the paper, to the way they’re expressed and feelings they try to evoke, everything… is geared towards gaining more readers or viewers.
As mentioned above, although this doesn’t cover the entirety of their work, correspondents are where they are because of the show. For any news the dateline, the line at the head of a dispatch or newspaper article showing the date and place of writing, is more important than the news itself, since info can be comfortably obtained through the internet in any news office in the world. What matters is the feeling that the reader gets when he\she thinks the news has been genuinely worked on when, in fact, it wasn’t.
Not only that, but when you see any correspondent answering questions from the news studio live you can be sure that both questions and answers were prepared and rehearsed to give them a confident and impactful sound.
As if that wasn’t twisted enough since it is easier to engage readers by using their own prejudices and internalized assumptions, many journalists skillfully omit, decontextualize, or emphasize part of the truth to simply get more attention.

Starting to lose faith in your prejudice of the Middle East yet? Oh, but there’s more!

Of course after so much work to get more attention than their competitors, newspapers & co. become conveyors of more than mere impartial news. They become conveyors of publicity. People being interviewed in the Middle East by Western journalists want to make sure their name and organization’s name is spelled right.
Such manipulation on the part of the state is not uncommon. As another example in one article Noam Chomsky says: “Iran is regularly depicted as the greatest threat to world peace—in the U.S., that is. Global opinion differs, regarding the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace, but the American population is protected from this unwelcome news by the Free Press.”
And so it goes.

“News is only what is different from the every day – the exception to the rule. With an unknown world like the Arab one (read: Middle East), this has a distorting effect. When someone is shot in Dam Square in Amsterdam, it’s news, but Dutch people know that people aren’t normally shot there. […] But how much do Dutch people know about the Middle East? […] If you are only told about exceptions, you’ll think they are the rule”

Listening to media outlets, being bombarded with the same type of news over and over would have us think that all throughout this region really nasty things constantly happen. And since we hear it often it must be true all the time, right (Goebbels taught this)? Now, to be technically correct the things that are reported on by the journalists do actually happen (hopefully), but there is one catch to it: how much do you know about the Middle East? Because…

“The ignorance of even loyal readers was sometimes so great that it seemed beyond remedy. […] It makes quite a difference if you have oil and gas or not, enough water or not, if you’ve been occupied by colonial powers, or you have to share rivers. […] I’ve probably profited from the ignorance about the Arab world”

The above manipulations to the idea that the Middle East is a distant world, helped by the overall geopolitical and historical ignorance about this region throughout Europe, have nefarious effects.
Events that happen in a country in the region magically cross space and time in the average reader’s mind. The truth loses itself in foggy, shadowy corners of his\her mind. A few fallacious logical or emotional speculations later a dangerous tendency to a generalization in perception appears: The Arabs have oil? They all do! The majority of Muslims are Arabs? No, wait, all Arabs are Muslims. And viceversa! And they all hate the West, didn’t you know? And they are all at war! Bonus theme: refugees!
And look where all this leads to! Safe, beautiful Middle Eastern countries like Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran are discarded as hellholes. Interactions such as tourism or small-scale investments are reduced. No contact between cultures develop. This makes all this ignorance grow like cancer. Distrust grows, nationalist parties thrive in Europe, isolated young Muslims there are easier preys to social inadequacy and risk finding recognition in the arms of Jihadists, etc.

And all of this because of media misrepresentation! This is undeniably why all throughout the West our ideas about this part of the world are wrong. In essence, if you haven’t been here what you know about the Middle East is what you have seen through a screen. Your prejudice is built on what you have no experience of. Plato would have something to say about this.

It may seem gratuitous to criticize journalism. Especially since the press and associated press freedoms are in the West considered to be vital for upholding the values we live by: egalitarianism, democracy, personal freedom, etc.
Yet you’ll find out that this is by no means the only book about media manipulation around. As an example, as far back as 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman proposed in their book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” the idea that media institutions are self-serving apparatuses working close to and being willingly manipulated by the political establishment. A paid-for propaganda machine.

It is, under this light, our personal duty not to lock ourselves in a media echo chamber, to think critically, to look for information on both sides of a fence. As one of my favourite fellow compatriots, Ioan Luca Caragiale, wrote over a century ago: “Take a half an affirmation of an opposition newspaper and mix it well with half a disclaimer from a government one – this is often a good recipe for finding out the truth.”

Better still, if we can afford it, it is on us to travel the world, to speak to people, to ascertain the truth with our own senses, to be the real masters of our opinions, to enlighten ourselves. It is even more crucial, once we have done it, to denounce the untruthfulness of lies and the fear and animosity that stem from ignorance. It is important. It is useful. Surprisingly, it can also be funny.

Because this part of the world is not what you’ve been taught.
Look with your eyes, think with your head!

Are you planning to travel to Iran? Check out our Iran tours.