Mutton Dum Biriyani

Here is another yummy recipe to enjoy a hot & spicy dish during your weekends! Trust me, it comes out wonderful even cooked at home when you follow the same steps that I suggest you! Yes, Keeping Dum  at home is really a hard task but when you manage to do it well, so is your Biriyani! 

Chop onions lenghth-wise and tomatoes into fine pieces. Heat the vessel in which you are planning to cook your biriyani. Make sure that it can hold the masala, rice as well as mutton. As a general rule, if you cook 1 kg rice then choose a vessel size of 2 kg.

Heat oil( you can even add ghee, if required) and add cloves, cinnamon & bay leaves. Saute for a minute and add onions. Let it turn to golden-brown and add ginger-garlic paste. Saute until the raw smell of the paste goes off.

Next add chopped tomatoes and let it get smashed out if heat. Make sure, you never burn the food at point in time. Biriyani can be cooked easily if you manage your time to do the related individual saute or pressure cooking processes. Add chilli powder, green chillies, corriander leaves and mint leaves and saute well. Keep the flame very low and let it be the same for 2 to 3 minutes. Meanwhile, get ready with the rice and mutton.

Before you start the saute process, pressure cook the mutton with ginger-garlic paste, chilli powder and salt required for the mutton. Make sure that you do not over cook the mutton as it becomes tiny when you cook with rice. Make it the first step of your biriyani making and it's gonna save you a big chunk of time!

When you start the saute process, keep water on other flame to cook the rice. When you start both these processes together you end up finishing these steps at the same time and it would be easier for you to put dum.

Once the water starts boiling add the basmati rice and required salt to it. Cook it until its soft but it should never break into pieces. If it breaks then the texture of biriyani would get spoiled. Once the rice is done, strain the water and keep the water separate.

This is the cooked rice. Just look at the texture!

And this the strained water and it finds its use in the dum process.

Now its time to add the curd to masala that we have sauted already. Then add the cooked mutton to it and adjust salt if needed. Finally, add the cooked rice to the top of the masala and just mix only on the top layers. Make sure that you never mix till the bottom.

Its time for dum process! Keep a large pan, preferrable an iron pan on a medium flame. Then place the vessel with biriyani on top of it. Close it with a correct fitting flat lid. Now place the strained water over the lid. So the food gets both from top and bottom and gets a perfect dum as done with a coal flame!

Its very hard to see the large pan at the bottom, just lookat it!

Let it be on the same flame for 10 minutes and on very low flame for another 20 minutes. Its done!

Serve it with Brinjal sesame curry, Onion raitha and chicken 65 or chicken fry!