How One of NYC s Best Indian Chefs Makes Biryani Epicurious 101

Biryani is considered this quintessential dish that almost defines Indian food. It is easily one of the most ordered dishes at any restaurant. Everyone always has this preconceived notion about biryani that it's an extremely time-consuming recipe but there's nothing to be really worried about. If you just look at it, it's all about layers. Today I'm going to be making a biryani with a dum method of cooking and dum literally means to cook under pressure. It's a very uniform and even method of cooking and it just makes the biryani super fluffy and super moist on the inside. A masala is just an aromatic blend of spices. I have a recipe for a biryani masala. It uses all these really nice warm aromatic spices. I'm going to toast them and then I'm going to grind them up. Do you need a biryani masala? 100%. Do you need to make it yourself? No, you can buy it. I have a really nice white skillet. I want to get the pan really nice and hot and then when the spices go in you can obviously reduce the flame because you don't want the spices to over toast and burn. So the whole point of this is to kind of release the essential oils that are on all these spices. So I'm not going to have any oil in the pan. Dry red chillies. So these chillies are spicy but they also have that really nice floral fragrant aroma of dry red chillies which is perfect for the biryani masala. Whole bay leaves. Mace which is the outer bark or the coating of a nutmeg. Very fragrant, very flavorful. Cumin seeds, caraway seeds. A biryani masala needs to have green cardamom in it and it's usually the aroma that stands out the most when you're smelling a biryani masala. Whole black cardamom is a very strong spice. Whole black peppercorns, coriander seeds. So the cinnamon is going to add that sweetness. Whole cloves. So I would think about four to five minutes and you can start seeing it. The one thing that you want to do is you want to just keep swirling your pan. You don't want the spices to burn. That's the last thing you want. If you start smelling the spices and you feel they're really nice and aromatic, pull them off. So my spices are toasted right now. They're perfect. So what I'm going to do is rather than leaving them in this pan, I am going to transfer them into another bowl. Have the nutmeg. It's a very delicate spice. Probably one-fourth of this nutmeg for so much of biryani masala. That's perfect. Half a teaspoon of the turmeric powder which doesn't need toasting because this on the heat would immediately burn. Dried fenugreek leaves which is also called kasuri methi. It's got this bitter umami and it gives a lot of depth to Very important tip. You don't want your spices to be too fine. You want that biryani masala to have a little bit of a coarse finish. It's perfect. I exactly want it to look this consistency. It's not a fine powder and some of the spices didn't even completely grind. I want it to look like that. I have chicken thighs and chicken drumsticks. The fact that it's on the bone lends a lot of character to the final dish. Chicken is a much more common protein that's in biryani. Though traditionally biryani was made with goat or mutton. With marinating our chicken, make your marinade and then add your chicken. First things first and the most important is the reserved oil from your birista. Birista is fried onions that we use for biryani. Traditionally if you were slicing onions, you would go along with the grain. You would literally follow the lines that are on the globe of the onion. For birista, you'll do it slightly a little differently. You cut it across the grain. So what you get are these even slices and strands of onion which you need to pull apart and break apart and what this ensures is that your onions caramelize and they turn golden brown but they also crisp up at the same speed and at the same rate. If you haven't had the time to fry the onions and make your own birista, you can just use regular neutral oil. I'm going to be using four tablespoons of the ginger garlic paste. So this is just equal parts of ginger and garlic. Ginger and garlic are two ingredients that Indian cooking cannot do without. Green chili paste is just thin slender green chilies blended with oil but this just adds that fresh heat that takes my chicken to a whole different level. Kashmiri red chili powder. Kashmiri red chili powder gives you this really nice bright red color. The turmeric and just that much is enough for the color that I want in the final product. The biryani masala that we made, coriander powder, salt and this is completely up to your discretion. Probably half a lemon into this. The reason why I'm rolling it like this on the wooden board is just it's going to release a lot more juice and it's going to be a little easier for me to squeeze it when I put it into the lemon press. I am very happy with the way that tastes is when I can go in with my chicken. I cannot forget to put the fried onions that we made earlier. We are going to be using about 70% of the fried onions. The remaining we save for later for the layering process. We're just going to let our chicken rest in the refrigerator for the next two to three hours. We're all ready to go in with the yogurt. I have full fat greek yogurt which I just whisked with a little bit water. I just got it really nice and smooth. I wanted to evenly really coat the chicken. The water from the chicken and the yogurt breaking down that really adds body to this chicken curry for our biryani layering. Traditionally we use dahi which is the yogurt that we get back home. Greek yogurt is a fantastic alternate to that. Greek yogurt readily available everywhere. I haven't been able to tell much of a difference when I've used greek yogurt versus when I've used regular dahi. So I have a nice generous bunch of mint and coriander, cilantro. So my greens are cut. I'm going to go in with half this mix of the coriander and the mint. So this looks great. The chicken's marinated with the yogurt and the herbs now. Good to go. I'm just going to set this to the side. When you think of biryani, the first ingredient that comes to your mind is the rice. For today's biryani, what I'm going to be using is called a sella basmati rice. If you look at it, the rice has this lightish yellowish hue to it which means that the rice has been aged and I can smell the age on it. I have my soaked rice here, soaking for an hour, hour and a half and it's perfect. So I simply soaked it, one, to rehydrate the grain of starch and to also reduce the cooking time when I'm cooking the rice. If I hadn't soaked this rice, it would easily take about 11 to 12 minutes. But with the soaking and with the fact that the grain's been rehydrated, this should not take more than four minutes to cook. I have a pot of water which is at a vigorous rapid boil. It's not just boiled rice, we're literally perfuming the rice. So I have a bunch of whole spices, star anise, I have some black peppercorns, I have green cardamom and cloves, a stick of cinnamon and bay leaf. I'm going to add a slit green chilli. I'm going to add a little bit of oil to my rice. I just like the fact that the rice has a nice sheen on it. When it's done cooking, I have some caraway seeds again. Just like you're cooking any starch or any grain, I'm going to go in generously with salt, adding lemon juice and then the whole lemon itself just preserves the colour of the rice. You don't want to keep agitating with a spoon, you don't want to keep stirring it, that'll break the rice. When I feel that it's 70 to 75 percent done, I am going to immediately take it out, just saw the rice and it's perfect. I'm able to smash it but it doesn't completely smash, it still holds its shape which is perfect. I have a sheet tray and I'm going to start fishing the rice out of this pot. I want to spread this out. If this just sat on top of each other, the steam is going to completely overcook the rice and I don't want that. I want the rice to be nice and distinct from each other. Rice looks perfect, we're going to move on to making our jhol next. So jhol is the fuel for a dumb cooked biryani. Jhol is literally a thin broth or a thin liquid that adds perfume and aroma to the rice and to the meat. Slowly start heating up this cream and let it get nice and warm. I don't want it to boil, I just want it to get warm enough where I add the saffron strands to it and it slowly and steadily releases its aroma into the saffron. We pull out all the special big guns for this dish. So saffron is not something that we cook with on a regular basis, it's a very luxurious ingredient. Our saffron's completely infused and while it sits in that bowl, it continues to infuse. In the meanwhile, I'm just going to melt out some ghee which is clarified Indian butter and I have a whole slender thin green chilli. I'm just going to slit it in half, I'm going to let the fat do its thing and again the same philosophy, the same principle, you're building flavor in layers. So kind of infusing that fat with the green chilli and we go straight inside. Now is when we add real perfume to the jhol and this just takes your jhol to a complete different level. This is what makes restaurant biryanis taste so fragrant and aromatic. So I'm going to go in with my rose water which is gulab jhal, that's more than enough. It's pretty strong, it's pretty flavorful, that by itself should be more than enough to give the kind of flavor that I'm looking for. I'm going to add the jhol and it's perfect because it kind of emulsifies everything together and you have this beautiful liquid, almost like liquid gold, just so fragrant, so perfumed. This looks perfect, smells perfect, our biryani jhol is ready. The next part of the biryani is making the dum dough, the thing that seals the gap between the pot and the lid of the pot and what this does is it traps all the steam inside. Of course you can definitely use aluminum foil and definitely you can use a damp muslin cloth to create that dum seal but of course nothing beats the traditional way of actually making a dough, rolling it out, putting it on the lid, putting it on the edges and really locking that steam inside. I'm going to go in with some wheat flour or atta as they call it, a little bit of oil and water. This is just for the simple purpose of making a really nice dough, a tactile dough that's going to seal the pot. I'm just going to roll it up into a ball, have it covered with a damp cloth and then I'm going to use this to seal my biryani when I'm done with all the layering process. We're down to our last step before we actually start layering the biryani. So I have a really nice heavy bottom cast iron skillet. The plan or the goal here is to not cook the chicken all the way through. So the reason why we're only going to cook it about 70 to 75 percent right now is to also preserve the moisture in the chicken. Full heat, I'm going to use a combination of two fats. I'm going to use the onion oil that we have from frying the barista, some clarified butter or ghee. Probably drop a little bit of that marinade just to see if the oil is hot enough. I'm very happy with that. I'm going to go in with all my chicken all at once, with the marinade, everything. I hate wasting any sort of flavor just left in the bowl because it's just going to go into the dish pit. I would rather get my hands dirty and then wash my hands off rather than just losing all that marinade and all that flavor in the bowl. Try to get a sear on the chicken so that it locks that juiciness and that freshness inside the chicken. I'm just trying to get a little bit of color on the chicken where I can tell that the chicken skin's been exposed to that heat. That's where all the flavor is. If you look at it, I haven't added any water, I haven't added any stock. I'm just waiting for the yogurt to break down. I'm just waiting for the chicken to break down. That's what is going to be the main base for this fantastic chicken biryani. Chicken's fully seared. I am going to get the heat down now so that I can slowly just put the lid on this and let the chicken cook. This chicken is going to take about seven or eight minutes to get there, 75% to 70% of the way done in terms of its cooking. I don't want to overcook this. The chicken should be done by then. It's time to assemble our biryani. What I have are all the components that I need to build layers in this biryani. I'm going to start off with first and foremost, the jhol. Spread out a very thin layer right at the bottom of my dutch oven. So the whole point of just adding a spoon of this jhol is for it to be the first layer of lubrication between the pot and the rice. So I'm just going to go in with an even layer of rice. Take your time with this. It's all about patience. So spread the rice out evenly. You want to make sure that you just have a little bit of rice that is going to be the first layer. The chicken's 70% cooked. I like the fact that all the fat that we used, the onion oil and the ghee has kind of surfaced to the top. Kind of swirl them around in that sauce because that's where all the flavor is. Fried onion. The mint. Very nice uniform layer of the chopped mint. Same with the cilantro. Nice uniform layer of chopped cilantro. I'm gonna go in next with my slit sliced green chillies. Not a lot, or depending on how spicy you want it, you can go in with more. I like my biryani nice and spicy. A lot of freshness and really controlled heat. Ginger juliennes. The ginger is going to provide heat, a very comforting heat at the back of your throat. Our jhol. One little nice spoon of it. All of this is going to create steam and that's what's going to help the biryani complete its cooking process. And we repeat the same process again. We go in with our rice. This is all about repetition. So what I'm also doing when I'm putting the chicken is I'm really swirling it in the sauce, getting it nice and evenly coated with that beautiful, rich, thick sauce that we have with the yogurt and just with the chicken juices. That is literally what's going to add body to your biryani. Spoon it over the chicken. Spoon it in the rice. So the biryani I'm making can easily feed about four or five people. I like three layers. You can obviously do two. If you have a bigger pot, you want to go in with four, that's fine also. You want to have a little bit of space just for that steam to evenly move and distribute throughout the pot. Do not mix this right now. Your time to mix will come. The whole point of doing this right now is to build the layers. You're going to mix it up when you serve it. If you mix this up right now, the chicken's not completely cooked, the rice is not completely cooked. And now for the fun part. This is the lid for the dutch oven. I'm going to put this on and the whole point of now is to create a dough seal right around the edge. When I'm rolling the dough, I just want to make sure that I get a long, even strand. Something I like to do personally is literally go outwards. So I start off in the middle and I just put gentle pressure, just allowing the dough to stretch with my rolling. I have a little bowl with water in it and what I'm going to do is I'm literally just going to dip my fingers and just run it around the edge of the pot. And the water kind of ensures that the dough sticks to it. And it's just like a little trick that I learned. I've realized that when you put water around the edge, it really seals it up super nice. And what I'm doing is I'm literally just like putting it on the circumference of the pot. Perfect. Nice and even. My lid goes right on top of that. I can just press it a little bit. Pop this in the oven at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 to 35 minutes. It's been cooking for the last 30 to 35 minutes. I'm very happy with it. The dough has completely firmed up, which means that as the dough cooked, it ensured a really foolproof way of the steam not escaping this pot. Be very careful because this is a Dutch oven, so it is going to be ripping hot. If you saw that poof of steam coming out of the biryani, you know you did your job correctly. All we have to do now is literally take a spoon, fluff it up and serve and see all the different layers and how the biryani came together. It's just the perfect consistency. The rice is not breaking. I can still see the steam escaping. Ready to start plating this now. So of course, biryani, equal parts of chicken and rice. So whenever I eat a biryani at home or even at restaurants across the world, the most traditional accompaniment for a biryani is raita. The way I like to make it is just by whisking yogurt, some salt, some cumin powder and then just putting chopped cucumbers and mint inside it. Biryani and in general all rice preparations back in India meant to be eaten with your hands. There's something really very comforting about shredding into the meat and the rice with your hands and that's exactly what I'm going to do. Don't let anyone tell you anything otherwise. Literally just taking some of the chicken, some of the rice, making sure I get those fried onions, make sure that I get those slit green chillies. That is perfect. I'm not going to lie about this. It took time, took a lot of patience and a lot of persistence, but it's so worth it. If you're entertaining people and if you put this on the dining table, I don't think anyone's going to leave unhappy. It shows in the final product and I feel biryani is one of those dishes that is a true example of labour of love.