Famous Indian One pot meal cooked with spices coated cauliflower. Rich and flavorful 🙂 It is surely a festive dish and this is perfect to cook when you have guests over or make it for dinner parties
To be honest, it does take time to cook biryani than many easy 10 minutes food. I even don’t like to post time consuming recipes but it is so tasty that I could not resist myself not posting it. The best thing about biryani is that it tastes great even the next day and the day after. It will save you from cooking for next three days and it will never be like you are tasting leftover food! Awesome right?
I usually made a lot of biryani’s both meat and vegetarian. I have more than 10 biryani recipes in my website which surely elaborates that I am a biryani lover. This one was just made for me. No special occasion or anything. I totally loved it! I have a biryani collection recipes on my website with all biryani recipes.
Biryani’s are best to have plain or with just some yogurt side like cucumber raita, garlic tomato raita or sometimes with gravies like paneer makhanwala, mirchi ka salan. If you want you can make some vegetable biryani like this and make chicken dry roast, chicken pepper curry or chicken 65.
My fav Biryani recipes : restaurant style Vegetable biryani, Mushroom biryani, paneer biryani, chicken homestyle dum biryani, restaurant style lamb biryani
To make it vegan, replace ghee with oil.
- For onion paste:
- • Onions – 2 small onions, chopped roughly
- • Garlic – 6 whole
- • Green chilli – 2, slit
- • Ginger – 1 inch
- • Khus khus (White poppy seeds) – ½ tbsp.
- • Fennel seeds – 1 tbsp
For Tomato Paste: - • Mint – ½ cup, chopped finely
- • Coriander leaves – ½ cup, chopped finely
- • Tomatoes – 1, chopped roughly
For fried onions: - • Onions – ½ cup, 2 small onions, sliced thinly
- • Cashewnuts - 6
- • Oil – to fry
For the rice: - • Basmati rice – 2 cups
- • Salt – 2 tbsps
- • Cumin Seeds/ Jeera – 1 tbsp
- • Ghee – 1 tsp
For the cauliflower: - • Oil/ghee – 3 tbsp
- • Bay leaf – ½
- • Cinnamon – 1 thin piece
- • Cloves – 3
- • Cardamom pods – 2
- • Biryani masala – 1 tbsp
- • Red Chilli powder –1 tsp
- • Cauliflower – 1 medium
- • Saffron – ½ tsp dissolved in ½ cup warm milk
- lemon to squeeze at the end
- Precooking:
- Grind the Onions, cashews, fennel seeds, poppy seeds, cumin seeds,green chillies, garlic and ginger into a smooth paste using as little water as possible. Set aside.
- Grind the tomato, mint and coriander into a smooth paste. Set aside.
- Wash the rice and soak in water for twenty minutes.
- Boil the water and add the cauliflower florets with little salt. Boil for 4 minutes and not more than that. Drain, wash with cold water and keep it aside.
- (Optional)Deep fry the sliced onions when it is hot. Don’t overcrowd the oil. When the onions turn light brown, remove from oil and drain on paper towel. The fried onion will crisp up as it drains.
Cooking: - Take a big pan, add thrice the cup of rice you use, and boil it. When it is boiling high, add the rice, salt and jeera and mix well. After 7 minutes exact or when the rice is 80% done. Switch off and drain the rice. add the a tsp of ghee on top and mix a bit for them not to stick.
- Take another big wide pan, add half & half oil and ghee in medium heat, and add the spices like Bay leaf, Cinnamon, Cloves, Cardamom pods, saute for a minute. Add the blended onion paste, and fry for few minutes in medium flame. It completely needs to get sauteed well around 5-7 minutes till the raw smell leaves. (Vegans use oil instead of ghee)
- Then to it add the blended tomato paste with turmeric powder and saute well. Add the red chilli powder, biryani powder and sauté them well till they ooze out little oil.
- Add the cauliflower and sauté well. Cook for 5 minutes till they mix up well and get little roasted.
- Now, the layering starts. To the sautéed cauliflowers, pat and level it. Add the drained hot rice on the top of it. Garnish with fried onions (optional), ghee, mint, coriander leaves and saffron dissolved in milk (optional).
- Cover the pan with a tight lid or foil with some heavy weight like mortar and pestle on top, keep it in medium flame for 10 minutes and then keep it in low flame. Keep an open pan (like a dosa or crepe pan, place the biryani pan on top of it and cook it for 30 minutes)
- Squeeze some lemon and switch off. Mix and serve hot!
2. You can skip biryani masala if you don’t have and add just garam masala (1 tsp and red chilli powder – 2 tsp instead of 1 tsp)
3. If it is spicy in the end, squeeze some lemon, it will reduce the heat and enhance the flavors also.
4. Vegans can leave the ghee
Taste perfect with raita or mirchi ka salan. Even having it plain is delicious.
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