One very tasty recipe that I love to prepare for dinner is Chicken Biriyani. I make this recipe once a week and have yet to find a meat lover who can say they don’t love it. So how did I create such a fantastic recipe? Follow me here for some tips.
First of all, the recipe comes from an Indian recipe called Biryani or Kitchen Slaw. While this recipe is definitely time consuming to make, it’s worth it! I usually start by adding cashews and cinnamon to my chicken stock when adding the chicken stock into the recipe. I then want to add raisins and cashew nuts to my recipe when cooking to ensure it has a nice flavor. This is much easier and desired to avoid dried pieces of chicken from other biryani recipes that I have had.
Once you have your base recipe ready, it’s time to start developing it’s flavor profile. Most recipes are fairly easy to modify to suit your needs. In fact, many people like to add different spices and herbs to their recipes to change the flavor profile as needed. With this recipe, however, I prefer to keep it fairly simple. To add spices I’ll simply use black pepper, turmeric powder (for color), and red onion (for color, flavor, and aroma).
Because this recipe uses yogurt, there are a few different ways to utilize the yogurt to make it more flavorful. If you enjoy the curd like texture of yogurt, you can add the curds to the recipe at the beginning and let it sit in the marinade for at least two hours. The yogurt will certainly add a lot of tasty flavor to the meal and help to draw out the natural flavors of the curry.
For extra texture and moistness I like to add either chick peas or frozen vegetables. Either way they work great to give the curry a bit more body. With the chicken biryani recipe I’ve mentioned, traditionally Indian food makes use of dry roasted chicken to give it a wonderful smoky flavor. If you don’t have access to dry roasted chicken I highly recommend using frozen chicken (which I often do) and gently browning them in a pan before cooking with the lentils. This cuts down on the weight of the chicken and makes it a lighter dish overall.
The final step of the preparation process is rinsing the curry off with water. This final step helps to remove any excess oil or flavor from the mixture and to lock in the true flavor of the recipe. I like to use 2 tablespoons of ghee for this final rinsing step. Ghee is an excellent cooking agent and cuts down on the fat content of the dish making it a wonderfully healthy dish to enjoy.
