Lamb Biryani with Nik Sharma _ Serious Eats At Home

Hi folks , I'm Nick Sharma .

And today I am going to make my lamb Barani recipe .

Biryani is a dish that's typically made at least in my family for celebrations .

I make it outside celebrations to whenever I have a craving , I'm gonna use lamb and we're gonna use onions , rice and a bunch of very fragrant spices today .

So let's make this together .

What do you want to , what are you doing ?

You need to be good .

Ok .

Well , I thought now I'm gonna prepare the marinade for the lamp .

I've already got my lamb chopped up , placed in a zip top bag .

So I'm gonna start by mixing the yogurt and this is plain unsweetened yogurt .

I'm going to now add my grated ginger and grated garlic and salt .

I'm gonna stir that as well and now pour this over my lamp in the zip top bag and then I will keep this in the refrigerator for a couple of hours .

You can also leave this overnight .

It will be completely fine .

You take a shake like this , squeeze out all the excessive from the bag and then seal it .

Well , the reason why this marinade works really well is because yogurt contains lactic acid and lactic acid is extremely gentle on meat .

And that's because meat , which is muscle tissue produces lactic acid .

So it's evolved to deal with lactic acid .

So this will be fine for several hours in the refrigerator .

Even overnight , the texture and the meat won't turn mostly like it normally does with other acids like vinegar or lemon juice .

And it's going to produce a very moist and um delicious meat .

Now , I'm gonna move on to preparing the caramelized onions and I'm gonna wait for the sauce pan to warm up a little bit before I add my key and key is an unsalted clarified butter .

It has a high smoke point .

It will also add a lot of aroma to these onions and they're going to be delicious once they're caramelized .

Now that my key is melted , I'm going to add my onions that I sliced earlier .

I'm gonna pop the rings out .

So they cook quickly and again your cooking time because we want these onions to get really caramelized and nice like a toffee caramel brown .

It's gonna take a couple of minutes .

Your cooking time for these onions will vary depending on the width of your sauce pan , but it's absolutely worth it because this is where a lot of the flavor building in a biryani grows .

It's these onions .

The next thing that I'm gonna add in here is a bit of salt .

This will help the onions cook for a little bit just to get the onions coated with the oil and the salt .

Now , you can see how these onions have reduced completely down in volume .

They've shrunk to almost , I would say 1/8 of the original size .

And these are a nice dark toffee colored brown .

This color development is extremely important because you want this bit of sweet flavor from the onions .

And we're gonna use this to build the flavor of our biryani .

Today , I'm now gonna leave half of the onions in the sauce pan and we're gonna add the spices and cook them and then the other half of the onions I've saved and I'm going to use this as a garnish for a biryani at the end .

Now to the onions that I've reserved in my Dutch oven , I'm going to add my spices starting off with cinnamon bay leaves , carom and cloves and this will start to get aromatic immediately .

So I've got turmeric .

I'm adding a little bit of mace , which is the outer little coating that appears on nut bank .

I am adding my Kashmiri chili powder .

And if you don't have Kashmiri chili powder , you can use a mixture of paprika which is smoked and a little bit of cayenne .

And I'm gonna add my masala and you can use store bought garam masala or you can use um the recipe that's available online at C seeds .

And now this has already turned extremely aromatic .

I'm gonna reduce the heat a little bit .

So the spices don't start to burn .

And if spices start burning , it's a big risk because things start to taste better and then you have to start all over again .

So it's better to go with a lower temperature than a higher one .

The next step is to add the lamb that was kept in the yogurt marinade .

I am now going to pour the entire thing in here and cook it .

There goes in the lamb with the yogurt and the marinade and I'm gonna squeeze this bag to get all that liquid out .

And now I'm just gonna fold this and the meat's gonna absorb all the flavors from the spices , the onions that we were cooking and it's also got the spices from the marinade to this .

I am going to add stock .

I've got lamb stock .

If you don't have stock , you can always use water cilantro and fresh mint .

And for those of you who like a little bit of extra heat , I've chopped up a Serrano again .

Feel free to use whatever green chili you like to use at home .

It could be a jalapeno .

I'm just using a Serrano or Thai chili peppers .

Those work quite well too .

If you don't like heat , then you can leave it up and I'm going to raise the heat to medium high and bring everything to a boil , right .

I'm now going to reduce the heat too low .

So this will prevent things from burning .

And occasionally I'll pop the lid open , make sure nothing is burning or sticking to the bottom and stir it around .

All right , I'm gonna pop the lid and let that cook for about approximately 30 to 45 minutes till the lamb is completely tender .

While the lamb is cooking on the stove .

I'm gonna wash my bass rice to do this .

There's a little trick I'm gonna use a fine mesh .

See if you can place it over a bowl or a large measuring cup , stick this over and my rice is gonna go over it and then I am going to wash it with running tap water .

And one of the things to do here is to watch till the runoff is no longer cloudy and that looks pretty good .

If you see the water here , it's transparent so that the rice is clean .

So I'm just gonna transfer it to this soak it with enough water about an inch above the height of the rice and leave that to soak for 30 minutes .

I'm now gonna check the lamb and make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan .

So every couple of minutes , I'm just gonna give everything a stir and you can see the lamb is already getting cooked .

Now , while the lamb is cooking , I'm gonna start preparing the rice .

So to start off , I have a sauce pan and I am going to heat it over a medium high .

So I'm gonna start with my water .

You can use lemon or lime juice which prevents the rice from getting too sticky and the rice that was soaking and that's been cleaned earlier .

The next thing that I'm going to do is also added a little bit of salt here .

And then I'm going to add three caron pas in which will give the rice a nice scent .

I'm also going to add a little bit of key .

The key will again prevent the rice creams from sticking .

And now I'm gonna bring the whole thing to a boil over a medium heat .

Once it starts to bubble , I'm gonna turn the heat to a low and let the rice cook for a little bit till it's a little bit out to like pasta is so that when you break the rice grain apart , you'll see an outer translucent ring and an inner opaque ring .

Now that my rice is partially cooked , I'm going to drain the rice discard all the water and let it sit in the fine mesh strainer that I used .

And then we'll come back to this rice and layer it with the lamb .

Now , the gravy for the lamb has reduced quite a bit , it's already thickened .

You can even take this a little further .

What I'm going to do now is layer the bass , the rice that I partially cooked on top and this will start to form the layers of the biryani .

OK ?

So the two layers are done the rice and the meat .

Now I'm gonna take my saffron , I'm going to grind half of it down to a fine powder using this motor and pastor and then the remaining strands .

I'm going to add them into this bowl with some warm milk to extract the colors .

So I'm going to add a few strands of saffron in here .

Oops , that's too much .

And I'm gonna grind this down because saffron is so expensive .

I don't like wasting it a couple of strands of the saffron and then the warm milk .

I'm using cold milk because the pigment that's in saffron is fat soluble .

And so the fats in milk will extract all that beautiful color out .

While the saffron steeps , I'm gonna get a rose water and my pan in water , which is sometimes called water or pine water .

It's the same thing .

It's very fragrant and it has the same molecules that gives bass rice its aroma .

Now , the saffron has been infusing for about 10 minutes .

I'm gonna pour that just randomly all over the rice on top .

The next thing that goes in here is the pan water followed by the rose water and I'm just again , going to just Sprinkle that all over for the final garnish .

I'm going to add those reserved caramelized onions that we saved earlier .

I'm just gonna put them on top because we're gonna cook this Biryani a second time in the oven , it needs to steam in its own moisture .

So , what I'm going to do is I'm going to form a tight seal using two layers of aluminum foil , tuck it really nice at the ends and none of the steam escapes .

And this will help the rice completely cook and the meat will also be really tender .

And now I'm gonna put the lid on top .

This will help hold everything down in India .

Classically when they make Biryani , they will put a layer of dough and let the dough act as the seal around here .

Aluminum foul works just as well .

Big boy , you gotta move OK .

You're right .

Like in the oven .

That's you get me sued .

All right , let's let me just put water .

Hm .

Now I'm gonna move the Biryani to the oven and let it cook completely .

The Biryani is now out of the oven .

I am going to take the lid off and then unwrap the foil .

Now be careful when you do this because it's hot .

The steam is gonna jump out from here .

You can smell the rose water , the pan and water and the saffron and those onions and spices .

All of that in there .

I'm gonna lightly fluff .

This don't overdo this because with Biryani , you want to show the contrast of colors between the saffron stained rice , the white rice and then the onions .

And then of course , all that meat and gravy that's sitting underneath , that's dried out .

So folks , my lamb biryani is ready .

Mm This is so delicious .

You can taste well , first of all , you can actually smell everything .

You can smell the fragrance of the floral rose water , the pan water that we added the caramelized onions , the spices from the cardamom to the cinnamon .

And then of course also the saffron little yellow color that it gives and also belong with the turmeric that we used earlier .

Again , this is such a simple , easy dish to make at home .

And I hope you guys had fun with me making it today .