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My Video and Social Media Project
This is my Video and Social Media project for WRIT 105M. It is a set, one 50 second video plus three Instagram style posts, all about sobhaneh, the full Persian breakfast. I filmed everything at my parents' home with my phone.
The video opens with tea pouring into a glass. The tea brews with saffron threads in the pot, and that is why it pours deep red instead of brown. Then the table builds piece by piece, and at the end the images flash faster and faster until they stop on the full spread and still not kebab fades in slowly. The song is Sharare Havas, Persian jazz performed by three legends, Viguen, Pouran, and Manouchehr. This music is illegal in Iran today, but in its time everyone loved it. I picked Persian jazz because nobody expects it. It breaks the stereotype the same way the food does.
Paneer & Herbs
Paneer is the salty white cheese at the center of every Persian breakfast. It is fresh, not aged, and it never touches heat. You tear bread, lay the cheese on it, and add a leaf of something green. Protein and calcium with zero cooking, which is why it feeds a whole family in about a minute.
Persian Omelet
The only hot dish on the table. Eggs cooked slowly in a pan with turmeric and tomato, then carried to the table still in the pan and eaten straight out of it with bread. No plates, no forks required.
Gerdoo (Walnuts)
Gerdoo means walnut. We soak them in water so they lose the bitter edge and turn soft. Walnuts bring the fat and the crunch that the cheese needs, and they are the reason a bread and cheese breakfast actually keeps you full until afternoon.
Zaferan (Saffron)
Zaferan means saffron, and this purple flower is where it comes from. Each bloom holds only three red threads, picked by hand at dawn, and it takes around 150 flowers to make one single gram. That is why saffron is the most expensive spice in the world and why people say it is worth its weight in gold. Here is the strange part. Saffron cannot make seeds, so every plant on earth gets grown by splitting the bulb of another one, which means all saffron is basically a clone of the same plant. Since the plants are identical, the quality comes almost entirely from the soil and the weather, and the dry high plains of Iran happen to be perfect for it. Iran grows around ninety percent of the world supply. In our house saffron goes into the tea while it brews, which is why the tea in my video pours deep red instead of brown. It also carries a reputation for lifting your mood, and researchers have actually studied that, which Iranians have believed for centuries without needing a study.