Barberries substitutes

The most widely available stand-in and the right colour, once you strip off the sugar and sunflower oil coating that supermarket cranberries are finished with.

Best for

zereshk polo, jeweled rice, rice pilaf, stuffings, chicken with rice

Rinse in hot water and pat dry, then chop each berry into two or three pieces, because barberries are a quarter the size and whole cranberries eat like chunks of fruit in the rice. Even treated this way the result is noticeably sweeter and jammier, so the rice tastes like a fruited pilaf rather than the sharp, bright thing zereshk polo is meant to be. Skip any sugar in the recipe.

Closer to barberries in genuine sourness than anything else on a normal shelf, since these are tart cherries dried without much added sugar.

Best for

zereshk polo, rice with chicken, koofteh, stuffings, grain salads

The flavour is deeper and almost wine-like next to the clean sharp bite of zereshk, and the colour is garnet rather than scarlet, so the finished rice looks dark and jewelled instead of flecked bright red. Check the bag: some dried tart cherries are sweetened, in which case rinse them too.

Zante currants are almost exactly the right size and chew, which matters more than you would think in a rice dish where the berries need to disappear into the grains.

Best for

jeweled rice, stuffings, koofteh, meatball fillings, pilaf

Flavour-wise they sit on the opposite axis: sweet, raisiny and mellow with no sourness at all. Soak them in the lemon juice for ten minutes before using, and add a pinch of citric acid if you keep it, which gets you much closer than lemon alone. Use these when the appearance and texture matter more than the sharpness.

The best match for the sparkling jewelled look and the sour-sweet pop, scattered over the finished dish rather than cooked into it.

Best for

garnishing rice, jeweled rice, salads, roast chicken platters

They are wet, so they burst and bleed if they go anywhere near heat or get folded through hot rice, and they add no chew. Use them alongside a chewy substitute rather than instead of one, and add them at the table.

The genuine last resort, listed because it is what most kitchens actually have.

Best for

pilaf, stuffings, emergency swaps

These are unambiguously sweet fruits and the dish will taste sweet. The sumac is doing the real work, supplying tartness the fruit cannot. Chop them to barberry size and use less than the recipe states, roughly two thirds, so the sweetness does not take over.

There is no true substitute for zereshk. Nothing sold in a Western supermarket is that purely sour without also being sweet.

Best for

zereshk polo, deciding what to cook instead

In zereshk polo the berries are the title ingredient, so a sweetened cranberry version is a pleasant dish wearing the wrong name. Two better plans: make plain saffron rice (chelow) tonight and order zereshk online, since it keeps for months in the freezer, or cook morasa polo, jeweled rice, where slivered orange peel, pistachio, almond and currants share the work and no single ingredient has to carry it.