Rangooni Rice and Mutton Stew

I have a lot to say, but I am exhausted from last week’s drama. So I will just write a recipe today.

This stew is as rustic as it can get. But rustic in a classy way, something that you’d want to eat over and over again.

My Mother-in-law learnt this stew from her friend who was brought up in erstwhile Burma. When I married into the Basu family, I also got married to some of their recipes. This is one of the regulars in my parents-in-laws’ home. Sadly, we don’t know the name of this dish, if you do, do let us know. Till that time lets call it Rangooni Rice and Mutton Stew.

For this recipe, you need very few things. Everything else is unnecessary.

Ingredients for Rangooni Rice and Mutton Stew are:

1 kg goat meat, bone and fat in cut into 2 inch pieces (I use the shoulder portion of a baby goat)
100 grams fresh ginger, cut into large chunks
1 cup rice, cleaned, washed and sieved (you can use short-grain rice, I used Basmati)
10 fat cloves of garlic, cut into slices
10 whole dry red chillies
Lime/lemon cut into wedges
3-4 tablespoons canola/vegetable/olive oil
Salt

Start by getting your mutton ready, wash and clean. Drain the excess water.

In a large pan, add the mutton, the chunks of fresh ginger and enough water to cover the mutton and ginger. Cook covered till the meat is tender and falling off the bones. Don’t overcook, like I did! (It happened over changing of diapers and giving LMN a bath.)

You may want to cook the meat the previous night if you are serving this stew for lunch the next day. Wait for the meat/ liquid to cool down completely. You will notice a layer of fat collected on the meat. Remove that with a ladle, discard or preserve as you may wish.

Start by heating up the cooked mutton and add the rice before the liquid starts to boil. Keep stirring and add more water if you want. Season with salt.

Once the rice is cooked and you have achieved the consistency you want for your stew, turn the heat off.

In the meantime, shallow fry your sliced garlic and whole dry red chillies till they are crisp.

This should be done on low flame lest they burn, which they do pretty quickly. So its best to babysit them till they are ready to come out of the pan. You may keep the oil in too with the garlic and red chilly garnish.

Ladle the rice and mutton stew into open-face bowls and add spoonfuls of the crispy garlic and red chillies onto it. Squirt some lemon juice and serve. (The pieces of ginger can be discarded before you serve the stew into individual bowls; they were added for flavour. Unless you are absolutely mental about ginger, and would want to bite into them.)

Its important that there remains complete silence in the room when you are eating this rice and mutton stew. That’s the only way you will hear the smacks of appreciation.

Yes, I love a little tareef when it comes to cooking with my heart. That’s how shallow I am. I also don’t take kindly to people who are thieves. “Shallow” and “unkind” are the two words that best describe me.

Hyderabad-inspired “Pakki” Biryani

I shall call this Mutton Biryani – Cyberabadi Biryani for lack of a better name. And I expect you to treat it with respect, just like the Nizams revered their Biryani. It may not be the authentic kachchi Biryani the royalty of Hyderabad is used to having, but quite close.

Close enough for second helpings.

I have many Biryani-loving friends in the real and virtual world – Finely Chopped, who can have biryani for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The very enthusiastic Tojo Roy, who waits and demands that Biryanis be made and posts be written without any delay. And our dear Amarnath Babu who has every right and reason to denounce any attempts towards Hyderabadi cuisine if it isn’t authentic. After all, he has a Blog of Hyderabadi recipes.

I have made this pakki biryani for a dinner tonight and will serve it with some cucumber raita and salad. A glass of red is paired well with a biryani like this.

The basic recipe is from here, though I have tweaked it a bit. So while I document it, you go watch the YouTube video and come back to my post.

Ingredients for Hyderabad-inspired “Pakki” Biryani are:

For the meat:

1.5 kg goat meat, bone in (you can use lamb, but I wouldn’t recommend chicken)
A little over 1 cup plain yogurt
1 cup fried onions
2 tablespoons green chili paste
2 heaped tablespoons of ginger-garlic paste
Half teaspoon mace powder
Quarter teaspoon cardamom powder
1 tablespoon coriander powder
Half teaspoon red chili powder
1 tablespoon crushed black peppercorns
2 black cardamoms, crushed
2-3 green cardamoms, crushed
1 stick of cinnamon
4-5 cloves
2 bay leaves
Handful of coarsely chopped mint leaves
Handful of coarsely chopped coriander leaves
Quarter cup vegetable oil
Salt

Ask your butcher to cut the goat meat in bigger than regular curry pieces. Lean mean is not needed for biryanis, so its okay to keep some fat on the meat pieces. I would recommend you ask for a baby goat’s shoulder portion.

Marinade the meat with all the ingredients except salt and leave it overnight in the fridge.

Find a heavy-bottom pan from your kitchen and transfer the marinated meat into it. Place it on low-medium heat and let it cook for 15 minutes. Once the heat spreads to the pan and the meat starts to show signs of being “cooked”, crank up the heat. This way the yogurt in your meat will not curdle. Add salt.

Cover and cook the meat till it starts falling off the bones. It should take you about 45 minutes to get your meat cooked on medium heat.

While the meat is getting done, we will simultaneously do the rice for the Biryani too.

Ingredients for the Biryani rice are:

3 cups Basmati rice, washed, and soaked in water for 30 minutes, drained in a colander
One and half teaspoons shahi jeera/ black cumin
2 bay leaves
2 black + 2 green cardamoms
1 stick of cinnamon
Half teaspoon grated nutmeg
Half tablespoon desi ghee
Salt

Heat water in a big saucepan. Add the whole spices – shahi jeera, bay leaves, cardamoms, cinnamon, nutmeg, ghee and salt.

Boil the water with the spices for about 5-7 minutes and then add the rice. The idea is to extract the fragrance from the spices and infuse it with our rice. The rice takes very little time to cook. Make sure you are stirring it and watching over it all the time. Check a few grains to see if its done. Drain in a colander and keep aside.

Since a pakki biryani is typically layered, we will ready the ingredients ahead in time and not wait till the meat and rice is done. The essential item for layering any biryani is – crispy fried slivers of red onion. Some biryanis also have boiled potatoes and eggs in between. I did not want to use eggs in this Biryani today, but since I did have a few baby potatoes, I thought they’d go well.

Ingredients for Layering are:

2 medium size red onions, very thinly sliced
1 or 2 potatoes, boiled and peeled
Fresh mint leaves, torn
Saffron strands, soaked in warm water
Few drops of Kewra essence
Oil for frying the onions

Slice the onions and deep fry them in hot oil to get a caramelized color on them, remove with slotted spoon.

I boiled the baby potatoes, peeled and fried them for a couple of minutes in the same oil the onions were fried.

The layering of the biryani is the most interesting part of the post-cooking phase.

The thumb rule to layering in pakki biryani is that the base and the top layers always have to be rice.

Here is the sequence I follow for my pakki biryani – rice, meat (without any of its gravy), fried onions, potatoes, mint leaves, little drizzle of saffron and kewra, and then rice again. Complete the layering when you have used all the meat and rice. Remember to garnish with mint leaves and fried onions and saffron and drops of kewra on the top.

Save the gravy to be served with the biryani later.

Keep covered. You can heat the biryani vessel on your stove top by place a pan or a tava at the bottom, so that the base of the vessel does not come in direct contact with heat. If the bowl is microwaveable, you can of course microwave!

I am sending my Mutton Biryani to Michael Lee West’s Foodie Friday.

Yours Sincerely, Bhaat-e-Sheddo-Bhaat

A Bengali has some off moments in between his Ilish and Kosha Mangsho days! Its usually the day after he has had a meal of daal, chorchori, bhaja, guli kebab, macher kalia, murgir jhol, followed by a big bowl of ras malai!

The next morning after a few green pearly pills of Pudin Hara and some nasty cho-n-aa dhekur, he is finally ready to give his stomach some rest.

Its then that our Bengali walks up to his doting Mother in his white Robin-liquid-blue-washed pyjamas and sando genji, continuously caressing his belly and says, aaj kichu khabo na. (Meaning I have gas, stomach ache and indigestion and I expect to be treated like a King!)

A whining son and a fretting Mother make instant connection in a Bengali home.

On cue, Mommy starts to fan him with her haath pakha, stroking his receding hairline, and complaining at the same time how he has lost weight. Overnight.

Her love overflows and she immediately orders all cooking at home to be stopped! Its a sort of an emergency declared. Her 40-year-old needs her immediate attention and also her slow-cooked phena bhaat with some alu sheddo, deem sheddo, daal sheddo, bhindi sheddo, and all things boiled and mashed! A baby food for a 40-year-old.

Pots of rice, potatoes, eggs, and Mushurir dal are fired up. The Mother stirs them to perfection – the right consistency is verrrrry important, she will nod to herself.

Pure gawa ghee is poured in a little bowl and melted. Ghani shorshe tel is brought out from the bhaandar. The servant is ordered to pluck fresh green chilies from the backyard.

Boiled potatoes and eggs are peeled and mashed with mustard oil, broken green chilies and salt.

The boiled Mushurir daal is zinged up with some more mustard oil and green chilies.

The rice, overcooked to perfection has to be served piping hot. Smoldering ghee takes overcooked rice to the next level.

The baby food is now ready for the Bengali.

This meal will now ready the Bengali for an evening snack of shingara-jilipi and a dinner of noodles and Chili Chicken, maybe some golden fried prawns too.

Return of the Risotto

I like Jamie Oliver for two reasons. He is a Taurean like me, and he is the most non-hassle chef I have seen. Maybe that’s two good reasons to have two of his bestselling cookbooks in my collection. Though I bought neither.

Its on page 143 of this book, The Naked Chef Takes Off, that I saw this very easy Shrimp and Pea Risotto, with Basil and Mint, two of my favorite herbs. I knew this was my passport to Italy.

However, I did not copy Jamie’s recipe to the core. I admit I made minor adjustments to it to suit my very Indian palate. Instead of cooking the shrimp with the rice, I used a homemade Creole seasoning to marinade the shrimps just to add a little versatility to my Risotto.

Ingredients for the Shrimp and Pea Risotto with Basil and Mint are:

1 and a half cups medium grain rice, I used Arborio
1 liter chicken broth
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3-4 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 heaped cup of shelled green peas
500 grams shrimp, shelled and deveined
Few basil leaves, finely chopped
Few mint leaves, finely chopped
Juice of half lemon
1 tablespoon grated parmesan cheese (optional)
Olive oil
Butter
Salt

For the Creole seasoning:
Half tablespoon onion powder
Half tablespoon garlic powder
Half teaspoon paprika powder
Half teaspoon cayenne pepper
Half teaspoon black pepper powder
Half teaspoon dried thyme
Half teaspoon dried oregano
Quarter cup of cooking wine for cooking

Marinade the shrimps in the Creole seasoning and keep for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the chicken broth.

In a pan, heat olive oil and fry the garlic and onion till they are pink. Add the rice and fry it for a few minutes on simmerish heat. The rice will start turning translucent. Add half the peas and mix well with the rice.

Add your first ladle of hot chicken broth and a generous pinch of salt at this time, stirring continuously.

Turn the heat down to low and cook the rice. Keep adding ladlefuls of the broth and stir continuously. Let each ladle of broth get absorbed by the rice before you add more.

At this point, you can also add a little dollop of butter.

It takes about 15 minutes for the rice to cook in the chicken broth. It will be soft but retain its al dente texture. Add the remaining peas and stir again. In the last stages of the risotto, you will notice a creamy texture to the rice because of all the starch it has released. Check the seasoning.
Turn the heat off and add the freshly chopped herbs and lemon juice. Mix again. You can add the grated parmesan if you want after you have stopped cooking the risotto.
The Shrimp with the Creole seasoning which essentially is the topping for this risotto has to be cooked simultaneously.  

Heat butter in a pan and add the marinated shrimps. Add a little cooking wine or dry white wine to add a whole lot of flavor to the shrimps.
Let the wine evaporate. Add salt to taste.

  Top the Risotto with the spicy shrimps and serve immediately. Its best to eat the Risotto as soon as possible to enjoy its perfect texture and creaminess.