One of my favourite rite rice based dish is biryani whether it is veg or non veg made with spices , yogurt and a lot of love. My love to create new recipes led me explore different flavour and variation like from fish biryani to rajma biryani .
In fact one has to make biryani with patience , care and attention to detail. There should be no hurry and cooking a perfect traditional biryani takes up time but worth it.
When you savor biryani for the first time,you realise what a splendid dish it is.
In simple words , biryani is a rice and curry cooked in one pot. Base of curry can be veg or non veg. Similar to lasagna, the curry is layered with semi-cooked rice , later to be baked or slow cooked till the rice is completely done and the gravy has been absorbed along with the rice.
This delish biryani is made with a little twist from the original one cooked by one of my very talented friend Sanober.
Ingredients and method :
Ratio is like if chicken is 1 kg : 500 grams rice : 1 litre milk
Soak few strands of saffron in 4 tablespoons of warm milk.
Cook the rice in salted water till 70% done and keep aside.
Marinate the chicken with salt, white pepper and a pinch of nutmeg for an hour .
In a cheese cloth , add roughly chopped 2 onions , 3-4 green chillies slit lengthwise , 3 inches ginger cut into pieces, 5-6 garlic cloves, 2 bay leaves, 2 black cardamoms, 3-4 green cardamoms, t tablespoons fennel seeds, 8-10 cloves, 2 pieces cinnamon sticks, 1 tablespoon shahi jeera, 2 star anise, 1 mace, 8-10 black pepper . Make a potli of this spices .
Heat a pan , add 3-4 tablespoons ghee ( clarified butter) and sear the chicken on high flame for 3-4 minutes. Now add milk and potli into it and bring to boil. Once it comes to boil remove the chicken pieces and keep aside.
Continue boiling the milk with spices potli and keep stirring it to avoid the milk from sticking to the bottom of pan and burning.
When the milk boiled for nearly 20 minutes , remove the spice potli and make sure to squeeze it out the flavour completely from the potli. Let the milk boil, add salt to taste and keep stirring it till it reduced half. Now remove half of the milk and keep aside. Add few pieces of chicken in this milk mixture and spread half the rice and half saffron milk .
Add the remaining chicken on top of this rice and pour the half milk mixture. Cover it with remaining rice . Now add fried onion on top , saffron milk and 2-3 tablespoons of ghee.
Cover it and cook on low flame for 15 minutes. Use heavy bottomed pan. Or you can bake it in oven at 175 degree C for 20 minutes. Doodh biryani is ready to eat.
Now to serve it with , I made a gravy out of spice potli by removing cardamoms, cloves , cinnamon sticks, bay leaves , black pepper. Made a paste out of remaining spices of potli and fry in ghee for few minutes. Add little milk to get a gravy consistency.
Serve this spice gravy with biryani .
Enjoy !!