Chicken Biryani - A step-by-step guide to the best rice dish ever

one of my most popular videos I've ever made was on a chicken biryani dish with over 140 million views now controversially I did a tomato version which isn't particularly common in a lot of the world but today I thought would take a deep dive into one of my more favorite dishes the hyderabadi Biryani let's get stuck in so the first thing we're going to need is a lot of crispy onions for that we're going to need a lot of really thinly sliced onions now you can do it with a knife the traditional way all you can do with the mandolin keeps them all consistent just be careful because these things take things off oh still gets the best of us all right time to fry the onions medium sort of low heat you don't want this too hot you want time for the caramelization to develop and you want to use a lot of oil a vegetable oil and you're kind of shallow frying them so that's about two centimeters deep there let that come up to temperature and then we'll get these onions in there so once your oil is at sort of a medium low temperature you don't want it kind of raging hot you probably want to do two or three batches uh otherwise you overcrowd the pan now just keep them moving don't walk away from this or you'll uh you'll have brown onions you don't want that the great thing about this dish is that it's really easy to cook for a lot of people and pretty affordable too you know you can use chicken you can use chicken drumsticks which are you know really affordable you can just leave the meat out all together if you really wanted to other than that you've got you know rice onions a whole bunch of spices and some yogurt so it's not that expensive to cook for a lot of people so at this point you can see the water's evaporated there's lost a lot of volume from the onions and this is where you need to pay really close attention because things start to happen pretty quickly here all right so we've got a lined uh tray some paper towel that we can turn our onions out onto and take them out just before you think they're good enough because they'll keep cooking all right time to rinse and repeat with the rest of our onions so we'll let those cool and we'll get our chicken marinating okay to marinate the chicken we're gonna marinate it in the dish that we're going to cook the Biryani in because I like to save dishes we have one kilo of chicken thighs skin off now you can use chicken drumsticks work really well you can buy a whole chicken and break it down works really well as well but I do think it's probably it's probably worthwhile getting something on the bone it's a bit more fiddly when you're eating it but I think it's worthwhile to start yogurt then chili powder this is kashmiri chili powder if you can't get cashmere normal stuff will do turmeric garam masala you can make your own or just use a shop bought like this Ginger paste a little bit of garlic juice of a lemon green chili just simply slice leave the seeds in cinnamon stick so I'm green cardamom pods we're going to go say six we're gonna get eight and we're just gonna lightly crush them cumin seeds four cloves salt and this is where we start layering in herbs so I've got some mint just roughly chopped of course coriander and last but definitely not least about a third or just more than a third of our onions that we just fried up give that a good mix around make sure all the chicken is completely covered and your spices are evenly distributed then we're going to marinate it so you can marinate this for 24 hours in the fridge you can marinate it for an hour just that room temp if you really wanted to but I suggest that you do it for at least four hours if not 24 hours but yeah really work the uh the chicken around because you want some of all those spices and everything to be nice and evenly distributed clean down your sides so that marinades all in there Chuck the lid on and we'll pop it in the fridge for four hours our chicken has been in the fridge for three hours at a time to start getting our rice now you want an aged basmati rice very important should be like a nice color like this kind of goldeny brown almost nice long grain and that's how we get those really nice singular grains at the end dish first up we need to wash it into a large bowl and over to the sink the cold water and we're going to rinse it uh two times so the third amount of water we're going to leave it in there I'm gonna let it soak for 35 to 40 minutes once our Biryani is layered we're actually going to pour over some saffron milk so I've got some warm milk here and we're pretty simply gonna steep some saffron on it if you can't get saffron or it's a little bit out of your budget just use some turmeric in place when we are cooking the Biryani we really need to make sure we seal the lid tightly and it keeps all the steaming and steams everything nicely there's a couple of ways you can do it you can put a tea towel underneath or you can make a little dough long piece of dough to go around the outside this is a little bit more work but it's kind of theatrical as well and I think if you're having friends over doing this kind of looks pretty cool plug it to the table pull the dough off serve it up some flour into a bowl we're not trying to make anything that's really going to be edible so I don't stress too much water in the middle and bring it together so you want a pretty workable dough you don't want too dry or too wet so we're gonna have to roll it out like a big log if it's too wet it'll kind of uh when the steam hits it it'll kind of Melt Away almost all right we get it to a Shaggy mess like this and we can start kneading it with our hands it's a bit sticky you just dust your ball with some flour I think where the dough came from was before you know when this was made a long time ago and they were cooking over open coal you kind of didn't want to put a tea towel on it because obviously the tea towel would catch fire and tea towels probably weren't that common back then either so this is kind of a common technique used in a few different cultures if you want to seal a pot properly pull a few really inexpensive ingredients together so I will roll this out into a long Batten basically and then we can let it rest and we'll do the final part once we've got everything laid up and it gives the time for the dough to relax and it's kind of easier to work cool leave that in the bowl until we need it large pot with a lid of boiling water it's about just over half full we're just going to season that with a little bit of salt and then we're going to flavor it get some green cardamom a green chili in half cinnamon stick two cloves some cumin seeds so when you're doing stuff like this it's all about layering flavors so anytime we can add flavor to the equation we will so we're going to obviously going to blanch our rice in this so by adding these additional Arrow mats all we're doing is a layering flavor foreign has been soaking will drain as much water off as we can all right let's get it cooked so I'm going to put our temperature on hot because as soon as this rice goes in it's going to drop the temperature so we're going to be really careful I can't emphasize this enough I'm going to cook this rice so it's just cooked it's like really Al Dente it's still got a bit of bite in there but it's still going to cook once we layer it with our chicken in the final dish give it one little stir and then get the lid on basically we're looking for this to comp to the summer again once has come up to the summer we can probably check it because it it's probably ready this really won't take long you're talking you know four or five minutes I'd say Max all right we're just starting to see it start to boil just to be really careful at this point because we do not want to overcook this don't be afraid to take a grain out have a taste not quite yet closer all right we're good we're coming out all right time to get everything else ready and layer this bad boy chicken from the fridge onto the Heat high temperature so we're not trying to cook the chicken at this point we're just trying to kind of start the process happening I'm going to do about four or five minutes on high temperature we'll keep stirring it pretty well and then we're going to remove half the chicken and start the layering oh [Applause] that smells incredible [Applause] all right so while our chicken is doing its thing over there we'll get our little dough uh ready for the outside so this dough is pretty wet use a bit of flour oh very wet and we're just trying to roll a big log that will be long enough you can actually just stretch it 'll be long enough to go around the whole of the pot so I reckon that's enough so that's good to go you kind of want it a bit sticky but you don't want to stick to the board when you need it all right time to start layering our biryani so like I was saying we're not here to cook the chicken we're just here to kind of get it going I guess so I'm going to turn the heat off completely and I'm going to pull out half of the chicken so there's six big pieces in here I'm gonna pull out three a little bit of the gravy too much though okay so we have three pieces left we'll make sure they're spread evenly now we start layering so we're gonna have two layers so two layers of chicken two layers of rice so it's a bit chefy of me but I'm just gonna clean up this pot you probably don't need to do this but we used to get told off if we didn't back when I was working for people in Europe that's better all right now we've got a clean pot we can continue on so sprinkle our rice see a cinnamon stick in there just leave it doesn't matter though even the rice smells good so fragrant just make sure it's nice and even okay our other chicken back in make sure you put all the sauce in there now we're going to sprinkle some of our onions this is like the best but the onions coriander mint and a last layer of rice make sure it's nice and even got this chilies in there we'll leave them in there more flavor onions more herbs and our saffron milk all right it's time to seal this thing up lid on and we'll seal it with our dough and the other option is just to put a teeth like a really nice clean tea towel under the lid now works just as well to be perfectly honest but I think this is the more traditional way could be wrong our Biryani is nice and sealed we're going to go straight to maximum Heat for 10 minutes then we're going to turn it down right down to really pretty low so I'm going to go like number two here on this induction and we're going to cook it for another 30 minutes all right she's been cooking for about 40 minutes in total we're gonna let it rest for 20 minutes before you crack her open time to crack her open it's always a bit nerve-wracking breaking one of these open I'm not used to not being able to see what I do as I'm cooking there's no hiding it so what we're looking for is nice individual grains of rice chicken nicely cooked and look at that that is what we're after nice individual grains of rice see if this chicken's cooked oh yeah yum time to play it up so on a big tray or something and you kind of want to Plate this up in layers the way that it comes out of the of the of the pot if that makes sense it's going to finish with a little bit more coriander and mint now we have a Hydra body Biryani it's a bit of pizza so the most important part what does it taste like um it's beautiful it's fragrant light all those different flavors and aromats are coming through your rice is perfectly cooked the chicken's still nice and moist yum this is one dish that's definitely worth the hype and it's really good reason why it's loved all around the world it's really not that tricky to pull together and it's one of those things that you just get better and better at making the more you do it so make this one for your friends and family they will love you for it thank you very much for watching Legends like if you took anything from this video subscribe if you're not and we'll see you next week for another recipe peace [Music]

Channel: Andy Cooks

Views: 3,604,543

Keywords: Cooking, food, dinner, meal ideas, dinner ideas, recipe, home cooking, Biryani, Chicken, indian cooking, india

Id: 6XlMguO9r-M

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023