Chicken Birayani – Rice and Chicken Cooked Together with Fragrant Spices

So, I have been missing in action for a few days. Now, I am still struggling with that list of things to be done. So, with this one I have posted two, reasonably traditional and comforting recipe creating in a row! If you went to the right kind of Indian restaurant and were fastidious you might even call them, well, restaurant staples!!! If it makes you feel better they could be Indian restaurant staples anywhere in the world, includingIndia, but staples are also what form the core essentials of a cuisine. Despite, my love for novelty I cannot really imagine offering a Chinese restaurant the time of day, if it did not have some good options for fried rice. I also know that my husband would have a conniption if we tried Thai food in a place that did not make a mean Pad Thai.I guess that along those lines, it makes sense for Indian restaurant to feature birayani’s and tikka masalas. With this preamble, let me bring on Chicken Birayani – An elegant, flavorful and comforting one dish meal.

This recipe is a class dish, and it was featured the past Sunday at the request of a student who said, this really was her favorite or after careful cross questioning, I learnt it was her husband’s favorite. She was Italian and he was Indian.  However, once agreed, Chicken Birayani was made, although I was later informed by the student that she would have really liked a vegetarian biryani option, but deferred to her husband’s choices.  I was not quite sure what to make of this information, other than wondering why the husband did not come to the class instead of her.

There are many renditions of this recipe! This particular one is a relatively simpler one hailing fromHyderabad, that I learnt during graduate school from my friend Ali. A birayani is a dish of Persian origin derived from the Persian word Birayan meaning to fry. These rice started in popularity inNorthern India, where they were introduced by the Moghuls, but later have moved to other parts of the country where the dish has been adopted and adapted to various regional nuances. So, there really is no single Birayani recipe, or one authentic style. So, the question becomes, what allows this dish to meander through its variations and still keep its name, IMHO – cooking together the meat and rice in layers, much like a casserole. It is important to have a good heavy cooking pot for this rice dish. I usually reserve lined cast iron cookware for this exercise.

I use a spice blend that I call my birayani spice mix, and I have featured this recipe here. I will make a confession that I have never used a store made blend, just because I usually tend not to, so I cannot really recommend a store option. I have had good luck with SWAD products, so if you want to give their blend a try please do so and let me know how it works.

Chicken Birayani – Layered Chicken and Rice Casserole

This recipe might seem very complex, but I have just broken it down into stages, to keep the order intact and to make sure that it flows in a good workable time frame.