My aunt makes this amaaaazing biryani. Once you have it, you don’t want to have any other kind of biryani. 🙂 I’m told this is a “behari” recipe.
Servings
8
servingsPrep time
30
minutesCooking time
1
hour30
minutesTotal time
2
hoursIngredients
- Curry
1 kg mutton
½ kg yogurt
4 medium onions
1 tsp salt
1 tsp red chilli powder (heaped)
½ tsp turmeric powder (optional)
2 tbsp ghee
2 tbsp oil
- Rice
2½ -3 cups rice
2 medium onions (for frying)
5-6 tsp salt
2 tbsp ginger & garlic paste
2 cinnamon sticks
4 cloves
10 peppercorns
1 black cardamom
2 green cardamoms
1 lemon
3 tsp sugar
¼ tsp saffron
Directions
- Curry
- Peel 4 onions and cut in half. Place in a saucepan with ¼ cup water and steam on low (covered) for 30 minutes. When the onions reach room temperature, put into an electric grinder and grind to a smooth paste.
- Marinate the mutton in yogurt, onion paste, garlic-ginger paste, and salt (in the fridge) for 4-6 hours.
- Slice the remaining two onions very finely. Heat the oil and ghee in a pan and fry onions till golden brown. Spoon out the onions (drained) onto a plate and, while they’re still hot, add sugar and lemon juice. Mix well (crushing the onions between your fingers). Set aside.
- In the same pan add the marinated mutton and spices. Mix well.
- Cook on high heat uncovered for a few minutes, constantly stirring. The meat will change colour.
- Cover and cook on low-medium heat till the meat is tender. This should take about an hour.
- You don’t need to check on/stir your meat more than twice in this time.
- When meat is tender, remove the lid and stir fry on medium heat to dry remaining water.
- Remove from heat.
- Rice
- Wash the rice and soak in water for at least an hour.
- In a separate pan, boil water and add drained rice in it. Half boil rice in garam masala (peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon sticks, black cardamom), green cardamom, and 5-6 tsp salt.
- Immediately drain the rice in a strainer.
- Assemble
- In the pan that contains the cooked meat, add the crushed onions (as a layer on top of the meat) and then add rice.
- Drizzle saffron liquid on the top and pour a few tsp’s of ghee/oil.
- Cover and cook on very low heat for 20-30 minutes (until rice is completely cooked).
- Mix the biryani bottom-up small portions at a time. Use a plastic or wooden spoon; metal spoons tend to break the rice grain.
- Garnish with fried onions and serve with Spicy Raita.
Notes
- When frying the onions, turn the heat off a few seconds before the onions are golden brown. When you’re taking the onions out of the oil, they will continue to cook. If you over-fry onions, they get a very bitter taste to them.
- Don’t keep opening the lid of the pan to check on the meat while it’s cooking. Meat needs steam to cook. Every time you open the lid it releases all the steam from the pan and takes a lot of time to get to that temperature again.
- When boiling the rice make sure you do not fully cook it. It has to be half done so that it can continue to cook with the meat as a last step. Otherwise it’ll be very mushy and unpresentable.
- When the rice is still boiling, make sure you set up the strainer in the sink so that you can immediately drain the rice when it’s half boiled. If you turn off the heat and leave the rice in the hot water, it will continue to cook.
