Spicy beef biryani recipe.

This is a recipe from Ben O’Donoghue and I was THRILLED with the results. I made a few changes, things like changing saffron to tumeric (too expensive), getting rid of mint leaves (couldn’t find any) and conveniently forgetting bay leaves (old age). Yet, the biryani was absolutely delicious!

# – Made it for a family dinner.

For the rice:

• 300-500 grams of beef steak, thinly sliced
• 70 grams of tomato puree
• A pinch of tumeric powder
• 50 ml of milk
• 500 grams of basmati rice
• 1 cup of coriander leaves, roughly chopped
• A pinch of salt

For the marinade:

• 5 cm of ginger, peeled & grated
• 10 garlic cloves
• 3 long chillies, roughly chopped
• 20 grams of papaya, peeled and roughly chopped
• 2 tablespoons of cooking oil
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 tablepoon of tumeric powder

For the spice mix:

• 100ml of vegetable oil
• 3 onions, thinly sliced
• 2 teaspoons of cardomom pods, bruised with the back of a knife
• 1 cinnamon quill, broken
• 2 teaspoons of cloves

# – First, dump all the ingredients for the marinade in a blender except for lemon juice and tumeric powder. Puree the mixture.

# – Pour it out then add the lemon juice.

# – Stir in the tumeric powder.

# – Add in the sliced beef and stir to ensure the beef are evenly coated with the marinade. Set aside while you continue with other tasks.

# – Prepare the milk in a jug and add the tumeric powder and a pinch of salt, let stand for about 20 minutes.

# – In the meantime, boil the basmati rice in salted water for 6-8 minutes.

# – Then drain the rice.

# – Now, to start with making the spice mix. Fry up 2/3 of the thinly sliced onions till brown (confession: I over fried mine a bit :P). Set aside.

# – Fry the remaining onions with the cardamoms, cloves and cinnamon quill.

# – When the spices are fragrant, throw in the marinaded beef. Reserve the marinade.

# – As soon as the beef are browned, pour in the tomato paste.

# – Followed by the rest of the marinade reserved earlier. Stir to combine.

# – Next, pour 1/3 of the drained rice over the meat mixture.

# – Then throw on some coriander leaves.

# – Cover with more rice and then a layer of the fried onions. Repeat until no rice’s left.

# – Pour in the milk mixture all over the rice.

# – Cover and stick in a preheated oven at 170 degrees celcius to bake for 15 minutes. This will allow the marinade at the bottom to steam the rice and flavouring it at the same time :D

# – Spicy beef biryani, DONE!

# – Stir it up before serving…

# – Delicious, fluffy biryani.

I made a pot of vegetable curry to go with it. Superb!

Before this, I’ve always wondered how people make good biryani rice, with the rice so fluffy and not sticking together in clumps. The thought of screwing the dish up put me off from attempting it.

I’m glad I got over the fear and made this because the BF and I LOVE biryani and now that I understand the basics of cooking basmati rice, I can experiment with more flavours in the future.