Heavenly Biryani Meal is Comfort Food for Many

In very simple terms, “biryani” is a spicy and herby rice pilaf with marinated meat (although it can also be vegetarian). While this is not a simple dish, nor a fast meal to make, it is flavorful and complex. If my spouse and I can make this, “Oh my god, honey, this tastes like real Indian food!,” so can you, for we are just simple home cooks following a recipe.

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_{Hyderabadi Dum Biryani Photo by Mahi Tatavarty • CC BY-SA 4.0}

History of Biryani

The word “biryani” comes from the word “birian,” a Persian word meaning “fried before cooking.” The history of the dish has been traced to modern day Persia, with an appearance in notes under various names as early as 2 CE. But once the dish reached India, it blossomed into something quite new.

The story: Mumtaz Mahal, a Queen of Shah Jahan, visited an army barrack and found the soldiers there to be heavily undernourished. She demanded the barrack’s cook provide the soldiers with a dish that was nutritious and had all the meat, rice, and spices needed to restore their energy (1).

The story provides a list of the four main parts of any biryani: rice, meat (or cheese or egg), marinade, and spices. Of course there are regional and family differences, usually showing up with variations in the meat (shrimp, lamb, chicken, or veggies). But each is placed in a yogurt-based marinade to absorb as much flavor as possible, and each use herbs and spices to finish off the dish. Exactly what spices and herbs may vary.

Types of Biryani

There are many different types of biryani (2). I am only providing a list of a few that I have tasted around my area.

Ambur biryani: a dish served with varying meats soaked in a curd before cooking. Then accented with herbs and spices.
Dindigul biryani: This is served with small chunks of meat, jeera samba rice and a great deal of black pepper
Hyderabadi biryani: One of the most popular types of biryani, and what I am cooking today, is a spicy, hearty dish focused on aromatic additions of cardamom, saffron, cinnamon, and clove; and uses less sauce (or gravy) than other recipe variants.
Sindhi biryani: This Pakistani biryani is known for its spicy taste, fragrant rice, and delicate meat.
Calcutta/Kolkata biryani: This biryani mostly uses potatoes and eggs, and is much lighter spice-wise. The marinade is made of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, and other spices, and the yellowed rice is flavored with ketaki or rose water.
Ambur biryani: Tamil Nadu makes one of the most famous types of biryani, and the town has more biryani shops than any other city in the world. The meat and rice are cooked separately, and then brought together, along with mint leaves and curd.

Ways of Cooking

Many articles I read mention three common ways of cooking biryani.

Dum Biryani: Parboiled rice and raw marinated meat are placed into a pot, sealed and cooked over low heat for hours.
Kachhi Biryani: Raw rice and marinated meat are cooked together, sealed in the same pot so trapping the steam, and cooks for hours.
Pakki Biryani: Rice and meat are first cooked separately, then combined and steamed for a shorter amount of time. This is the style of biryani I am making today.

Marion’s Hyderabadi Lamb Biryani in Pakki Style

I saw Marion’s video of this dish, then looked up the recipe here and thought to myself, “hmm, that sounds relatively easy to make, it just has a lot of steps.” Then I thought to myself that I had not made a biryani in quite a while. So decided to try Marion’s recipe, and enlisted my spouse to help with the salad and sauce side dishes.

Here are what we did with Marion’s recipes, modifying some steps to match what we had available to us.

_{I fried the meat in ghee in my cast iron skillet until it browned a bit, then lowered heat, put on a lid and cooked on my stove’s lowest setting for ~2 hours. Photo by PattyCooks.}

Lamb Curry Marinated Overnight

Although it calls for 1kg (~2 lb 3 oz) boneless lamb shoulder, we could not find that cut in our local store, so we settled to use precut lamb stew meat. Turned out we took everything the butcher had, which was $24 USD worth of meat. Once home, those meat cubes were cut to make sure individual pieces were not bigger than ~1.5”, using my kitchen shears.

Then I mashed, in my mortar and pestle, ingredients for the marinade: 1T sliced skinned ginger, 4 large peeled and diced garlic, 1 diced jalapeño (without seeds or membrane) and 2t kosher salt. Since I do not have a large mortar and pestle, the smaller the pieces (and adding the salt), the easier it is to make a mash. Once the mash looked similar enough to hers, and was well combined, I put it into a bowl.

As an aside, I should have used the planer to really pulverize the ginger and garlic so these very strong flavored aromatics were better integrated into the mash.

Then I added the rest of the ingredients to that bowl: 1T ground coriander, 2t garam masala, 1t chilli powder*, ½t ground turmeric, and 1C plain Greek yogurt. I mixed it all up and added the chopped lamb to the bowl, making sure every piece was well covered. The bowl was then covered and went into the fridge overnight.

Cooking the Meat

But things happened, and it turned out that while I put it in the fridge on Saturday at 4pm, I did not make the dish until Monday at 9am. So it marinated longer than anticipated.

On that Monday I completed the lamb by heating up my cast iron skillet with 2T ghee (but I think I could have also used coconut oil if ghee was unavailable), and fished the meat out of the marinade with my hand to fry them up. I watched the meat cook in the 12” skillet, and waited for it to brown a bit, then put my wok lid on (the only one that fits), and turned the heat down to its lowest setting to cook for ~2 hours.

Once done I tasted a piece and it was definitely meltingly soft and very flavorful. I set this aside for it was all ready to be one of the biryani layers.

_{The water, herbs + spices and rice on the bottom now ready for the first cooking. Photo by PattyCooks.}

White Basmati Rice

We had to buy more Basmati rice, for it called for 2½C dry white rice, which I washed in a bowl and drained, then soaked for ~30 minutes with clean water. Then I drained the rice one more time and placed the rice into the cooking pot.

To the rice I added clean water, then 4 dried bay leaves, 8 crushed cardamom pods, 6 whole cloves, 1 cinnamon stick and 3t of kosher salt. Brought it to a boil, then turned down the heat and let it cook an additional ~5min. Finally, took the pot off the heat, strained off any remaining water, and dumped everything, rice and aromatics, into a bowl to cool down quicker.

Saffron Milk

I turned to preparing saffron milk by heating 2/3C of fat-free milk for 30sec in the microwave, rather than use a pot on the stove. The key was it needed to be warm, but not hot; so I dipped my finger into the milk to make sure it was at the proper temperature.

The recipe called for adding 2 grams of saffron to the milk, but I had only 1 gram; and that 1 gram cost me $25 USD. So I added all the saffron I had and set the measuring cup of warm milk aside to infuse, while I moved on to the next bit, the onions.

Fried Purple Onions

I sliced purple onions so they were onion rings, and then fried them in batches in my wok. Using a spider, I moved them from the oil once browned, onto a paper-towel lined baking sheet to dry and cool down. This became one of the dish’s layers. From there I moved to prepare the herbs.

Side note here, these onions did not get crispy and brightly colored, but were soft and brownish. Not an attractive color, but definately a tasty addition to the dish.

Herbs

I harvested a cup of mint leaves from the back yard, washed and chopped it all up for the dish, then did the same for fresh cilantro.

Don’t do what I did and forget to set aside enough for the side dishes. This whole meal needs 1C for the biryani, plus 3T of chopped cilantro and mint for the side dishes.

The Biryani Assembly

To make the final dish I had to assemble the biryani layers. So I used my broth or soup pot and added the ingredients in order:

Placed all of the lamb and remaining juices in an even layer on the bottom.
- Because the marinade sauce dried onto the skillet, I had to add some water so I could scrape all that flavor goodness into the cooking pot.
Then added a layer of the rice, half of it with aromatics, and packed down tightly.
Scattered half of the fried onions on top of the rice.
Distributed half of the fresh chopped mint and cilantro as the next layer.
Followed again with the remaining half of rice, onions, and herbs, packing down firmly.
Then I poured the saffron milk on top in a pattern so there would be a mix of yellow and white rice in the end.

Finally, I put a layer of parchment paper and a layer of aluminum foil on top of the food and pressed down, and added the lid. This was put on a very low setting to cook for ~15-20min, and then the heat was turned off, and the lid stayed on for ~10-15min longer.

_{This is my dish looking down on the pot. The onions turned brown, but were tasty. The bottom was crispy as it should be and was nicely crunchy. Photo by PattyCooks.}

Serving with Sides

The result was a well cooked rice dish with layers of flavor. But the side dishes added even more flavor to the overall taste.

Kachumber Salad

My spouse diced 1 small, semi-peeled cucumber, 1 tomato, and ½ red onion. All that went into a small bowl along with 2T each finely diced cilantro and mint leaves, the juice from 1/2 of a Meyer lemon, and 1/4t ground cumin along with 1t kosher salt.

Onion Raita

This was an easy to mix in one bowl. We added 1/2C Greek yogurt, 1/4 diced red onion, 1/2t kosher salt, 1T finely chopped mint and cilantro, and 1T of deseeded and minced jalapeño (more or less to taste).

_{Marion’s partial photo of her biryani and side dishes, so you can see what it looks like.}

Salutations

Okay, so my onions came out consistently darker than hers, and her rice is more uniformly colored (needed that second gram of saffron), but my dish did taste really good. The sides looked the same and they were pretty simple to make.

This dish made 6 servings, which meant we used it for several meals. However, it was a rather expensive meal to make. In the San Francisco Bay Area, saffron is ~$25/gram and 2# of lamb meat cost us $24 USD. But given all the ingredients we used the actual cost would probably be in the $75 USD range, or ~$12.50/serving.

—Patty