Cooking With Fox: Chicken Berry Biryani

23 Nov, 2024

For the uninitiated, biryani is an Indian baked rice dish: all the lovely proteins/veg, spices and rice in one gorgeous pot of flavour ready to be dished out. Over here in the fox/dog household we're by no means biryani wizards, but we do have one in our regular meal rotation because we both adore it. After doing it again earlier this weekend, I was inspired to share the wisdom!

This recipe is basically taken wholesale from the cookbook of the restaurant Dishoom which we bought on a whim ages ago. Many of its recipes are quite elaborate - definitely on the "I'm a hardcore foodie with loads of time and a well-stocked Asian supermarket nearby" scale of things - but this biryani recipe has become a household regular for us. If you do any kind of Indian cooking you'll likely have a bunch of these ingredients handy most of the time, and portion-wise it makes for 4x big portions so enough for two people for two days. There's a few adaptations and notes which I'll mark clearly.

Ingredients

Rice

• 300g basmati rice
• 2 tsp salt
• Juice of ½ lime

Base / marinade

• 500g or so chicken thigh or breast, cut in big chunks
• 1 tbsp ginger paste
• 1 tbsp garlic paste
• ½ to 1 ½ chili powder, depending on your taste and the strength of the chili powder you have (you want this to have a li'l heat but it shouldn't be angry with you)
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 ½ tsp garam masala
• Juice of ½ lime
• 100g Greek yoghurt or vegan equivalent (we use coconut-based "plain" yoghurt due to household dairy intolerances)
• 30ml vegetable oil
• 1-2 chilies, cut into thin strips
• Approx. 3cm fresh ginger, cut into thin strips ("matchsticks", the book calls them)
• A heapful of crispy fried onions (you can just fry 1-2 onions until crisp but we always have a tub of store-bought handy)
• "6 large mint leaves", chopped (idk what "large" means but we just take a heapful)
• 5g coriander leaves, chopped (again, we just wing it and take a whole bunch)
• OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED (see recipe): a bunch of dry twigs, i.e. 1 cinnamon stick, 3-4 star anise, 4-5 cardamom pods, bunch of cloves. These aren't in the original recipe but they add soooo much good flavour.

Topping

• 20g butter (or vegan equivalent)
• 3 tbsp double cream (or vegan equivalent, again - just marking these here to confirm that they work too)
• a handful of dried cranberries
• (OPTIONAL: the recipe book calls for "1 quantity of saffron water" so use that if you want to be more authentic, but we're not fancy enough to have saffron at hand)

Steps

1. Combine the chicken with all the rest of the marinade ingredients (apart from the dry twigs) and let it marinade in the fridge until ready. We usually do this the night before to give it some good marinadin' time.
2. Wash the rice about 3-4 times, then let it soak in a pot full of cold water for 45 minutes.
3. Heat the oven to 200c / 180c fan.
4. Once rice has done soaking, drain it and then tip it in a pot of boiling water together with the salt and the lime juice. Let it boil for about 4-5 minutes or until 3/4 done (if you take a grain out of the pot and press against it, it should feel a little firm but easily break into pieces).
5. While the rice is boiling, transfer the chicken into an oven-proof dish/pot. If you're using the dry twigs, add them on top of the chicken. When the rice has finished boiling, drain it and then layer evenly on top of the chicken.
6. Heat the butter and the cream in a microwave until it's all one combined liquid, then pour on top of the rice. Scatter the dried cranberries on top.
7. Cover with a lid or some foil and place in the oven for 40-45 minutes. If you're using frozen chicken you thawed out before, leave it in the oven for a bit longer to ensure it's all cooked through (speaking from experience here). Take out of the oven and then let it sit covered for about 10 minutes before serving. Either fish the twigs out now or if you don't want to disturb the peace of the dish, just be mindful of them while plating/eating.

I recommend serving this with some raita, as the fresh yoghurty side "salad" works perfectly with the richness of the chicken and rice. Use your favourite recipe - for us, we add some of the fresh coriander and mint we already have on account of the main recipe, and mix them with yoghurt, garam masala and typically finely chopped cucumber, red onion and/or tomatoes.

I hope you give it a go, if something like this floats your boat!

P.S. I appreciate the blog's been a quiet, but I haven't forgotten about it - life's just been mad in November and I haven't had much chance to do anything to blog about. But listmas is round the corner and there's all kinds of end of year wrap-ups in store...

#cooking