Cooking like jazz: Biryani

So you want to cook a biryani.

TL;DR

Here’s your recipe: Cook together 1:1 (by weight) rice and meat with approximately .05 spices (5% of the weight of rice/meat). And even the meat I suppose can be replaced with vegetables/paneer in a pinch.

Cooking like jazz

Part of the reason I love biryani is that it really illustrates the principles of cooking like jazz. The basic “chords” are super simple, and like jazz classics there are innumerable variations - each of which tells a story, each of which feels “right” to some people.

As a cook, it’s great to try the variations that other people have come up with - you can even try to duplicate them - but like jazz, the important thing is to figure out what you like. Understanding your own choices will help you better understand where other people are coming from.

Problems that define a biryani

Once you start with your basic recipe - Rice + Meat + Spice (1:1:.05), you immediately run into some issues. The choices you make to solve these issues drives the flavor of the result.

1. rice and meat (usually) cook at different rates. Some solutions: slice the meat fine (or in the extreme, mince the meat), pre-cook the meat
2. rice and meat cooked together could result in pockets of uncooked rice. Solutions: Layer the rice and meat, bake the biryani at a lower temperature for a longer period, pressure cook to ensure consistent cooking through pressure.
3. rice cooked on the stove top has a tendency to burn/crisp at the bottom. Solution: Bake in an oven at low temperatures to reduce the crisping, or embrace the constraint - add butter/ghee to make the the rice crunchy (much like an Iranian tahdig).

Historical origins

Muslims meet Indian spices

This comment on the “tahdig” solution above is as good a segue into the historic origins of biryani. Through the Muslim world there are various forms of pilafs or pulaus - fancy rice dishes that sometimes include meats. The meats are often flavored with ginger, garlic and onion, the rice enhanced with onion, dried fruit and nuts and slices of boiled egg. Muslims brought these pilafs to India, and in India the spices and flavors intensified - i.e. that spice quotient increased to .05 - and that’s when it became biryani. (There is a thing in Isfahan in Iran that is apparently also called a biryani. It’s a twice cooked lamb kabab, and while it looks great, it’s not what I’m writing about here.)

Within India, Biryanis were primarily a muslim food, and thus spread through India along with migrations of muslim populations. As muslim populations interacted with the locally available produce the flavors of the biryanis changed as well. In fact the transition from (milder) pilaf to spicy biryani itself was perhaps a result of much greater availability of spices through trade with southern India.

Often the history of biryanis is described in terms of the actions of the muslim rulers or conquerors. This just seems wrong to me on two fronts. While the occasional innovation or fashion in food does percolate down from the top, in my experience the true battles for the heart of popular food take place in the marketplace. Secondly, there’s a political goal in describing the muslims as invaders (who don’t belong) or those who converted (who are collaborators and suspect), whereas most of the muslim populations were (like the hindu populations) migrants who moved around the country looking for opportunities, settling where it made sense for them. The muslim invaders and rules of India did “convert” hindu kings and sometimes subjects through victory in battle, but this was a religious whack-a-mole - as soon as the invaders left the hindus re-converted back - that more successful muslim rulers learned to avoid.

This dish with onions, ginger and garlic met spices (malabar spices: black pepper, cinnamon, mace, nutmeg etc) and the more general “curry” spices - coriander, cumin. In addition to spices, the meats started to be cooked with sauces (a la curries), with ground nuts, dried fruit and diary products (dried milk “khoya”, yoghurt) added to the meats as they were (pre) cooked. Saffron and rose flavors predominant in Iranian food started to mix with pandan flower (kewra).

The european influence

What do the europeans have to do with biryani? They added 3 things to the mix - chillies, tomatoes and potatoes.

It’s sometimes shocking to people to find that perhaps the defining element of Indian food (and Korean food and Thai food and …) - chillies, hot and spicy - are “new world” foods that only got to India through trade with the americas.

The new flavors got added to biryanis in different ways - Calcutta biryanis have meat and potatoes but mostly whole (malabar) spices, mild and fragrant. Hyderabadi biryanis have a lot of chillies but usually few tomatoes and no potatoes. Mumbai biryanis have tomatoes, potatoes and chillies.

The melting pot

The wikipedia page for biryani shows the remarkable variety of biryanis that have been created so far. Here’s a rough guide to options for making your own biryani…

Rice - partially pre-cook the rice, with stock/cumin seeds/bouquet garni. Or cook the rice with meat from the start (more like a pilaf).

Meat - beef, goat, lamb, chicken, fish, prawns, paneer, vegetables.

Cooking the meat - bbq, uncooked, deep fried, curry

Marinating the meat - chilli powder/turmeric/salt, yoghurt, other spices, papaya (to tenderize meat), no marinade

Curry: Fried onions w/ ginger/garlic, Tomatoes (cooked dark/dry to accentuate umami flavors or looser to add sourness and more “tomatoey” flavor). Yoghurt, Mawa, ground nuts, lentils, ground coconut, coconut milk. Spices: Green chillies (or not), malabar spices, turmeric, chilli powder, cumin, coriander

Pre-cooking the meat with the curry - pre-sear, reverse sear, no sear. Slow cook, sous vide or use a pressure cooker.

Luxurious touches: fried raisins, nuts, sliced boiled eggs, saffron (toasted and mixed with milk), rose water, kewra water.

Cooking the finished dish: Layer rice and meat (starting with rice to get crunchy rice, starting with meat to… not).

Tahdig: If going for tahdig style crunchy rice, make sure the meat curry is very dry (If the liquid filters to the bottom through the rice it’ll ruin the crunch). Start with a layer of ghee on the bottom of the pot, warm it, then add half the pre-cooked rice, meat, rice, luxurious touches, and cook on the stove top for 10-15 min.

Cook on the stove or in the oven (or in a pit with charcoals if feeling especially adventurous).

What’s your influence?

What are you going to add to the world of biryani? A chinese biryani? (Chinese rice clay pots - that’s a whole different adventure!) A southern bbq biryani? Have fun - and be sure to let me know how it goes!

Image source, credit: Muhammad Umair Mirza