Rice, Rice, Gravy

Remember Vanilla Ice? He had that song "Ice, Ice, Baby". He was Eminem before Enimem. OK, he wasn't. No one particularly respected him as a rapper, least of all, serious rappers. Still, it wasn't like they brought a white guy who had no knowledge of rapping and made him a star. He was into the local scene, though he certainly didn't dress like M.C. Hammer until after they wanted a white M.C. Hammer.

My friend, who is Indian, thought the lyrics were "Rice, Rice, Gravy". Which I suppose is not surprising for someone Indian.

Which leads me to my topic du jour. I want to talk about chicken biryani. There's a bunch of well-known rice dish/meals. The Spanish have a dish called paella, which usually is rice with clams and other seafood, though certainly, it could have other ingredients. In the same vein, there's Cajun Jambalaya.

The Indians and Pakistanis have a dish called chicken biryani which is pronounced CHICK-EN (ah, just kidding), beer-ee-ah-nee, or something close to that. It's similar to pulao, which is usually vegetarian. Biryani typicaly has some kind of meat, and usually, it's chicken.

I tried making this recently from Mark Bittman's cookbook, The Best Recipes In the World. The chicken biryani I knew was made by a friend from Pakistan. He really only knew this one dish, which he got from his mom, and if he had one dish to learn, this certainly wasn't a bad choice. While I've loved Indian food, I've always been deterred from making Indian cuisine. There's so many ingredients. Just the spices alone account for up to ten ingredients.

Indian food is, well, like their clothing, not very subtle. Many recipes call for ten spices, often heated in oil, until the smell permeates the entire domicile, and you know you're cooking Indian, which is all good and well if your housemates like Indian.

Indian cooking, especially non-vegetarian cooking (say, Muslim Indian cooking) have the worst features of Chinese and American cooking. Chinese cooking tends to be long on prep time, quick on cooking, especially stir fries. American cooking tends to be short on prep time and potentially long on cooking, say, steaks. Indian cooking is long on prep time and long on cooking.

My friend (the "rice, rice, gravy") guy told me that you had to cook meat with spices until the taste of meat went away. I never thought much about the taste of meat. Having eaten it all my life, and most likely, finding the natural flavors just fine, I never considered that spices were used, back in the days before refrigeration, to hide the taste of rotting meat, and even after refrigeration has become common place, tradition Indian cooking may still view the natural taste of meat as something that has to be spiced over.

Anyway, I was following Bittman's recipe. Bittman prefers simplicity, which I like too, because I certainly don't want to spend hours slaving at a stove. I want a dish to turn out well, but I'd like to spend under an hour making it. Since I've had far more Indian food since the days I ate that biryani, I have a better idea of what it should taste like.

My friend used to make some concoction, then shove it in the oven. Bittman's recipe doesn't do that. And it lacks the one thing that I remember about biryani. It wasn't particularly spicy. If you looked at the ingredient list, you'd say, duh, it doesn't have any chilis at all.

The other problem I had was that the rice turned out way too wet. The biryani I've had have often been really dry, perhaps too dry. In any case, even the Chinese rice I'm used to isn't half as moist as the stuff I made, so I knew that something was wrong, that somehow I have to cut back on the liquids.

It also browned the bottom of the Creuset knockoff that Dave owns something fierce. Fortunately, it's the kind of thing that doesn't cause such pots long-term damage.

There are two things I want to change in the recipe. Number 1, make it spicy. Number 2, make it drier. I'll see how that works out. There are a gazillion recipes out there, and it's really hard to judge which one to try out.

This is one thing I like to do when I make something, which is to repeat it a few times, playing around with the recipe. I did this several times with Beef Stroganoff and was never happy with the result. As I mentioned in a previous post, the roux was the key that made the Stroganoff something I wanted to eat.

I'll say, for many years, I thought about cooking. I bought cookbooks prodigiously. I own like 40 or more cookbooks, but rarely cooked from them because the labor was so intensive. The Sunday dinners we have at our house gave me an excuse to try some of the more complex recipes, although the people eating it are often the first to experiment the dish. I think Bittman's book is a good start. I won't attest that it's the most authentic cookbook out there, but it seems pretty good for a start, and with the web, I can find alternatives if I'm not happy.

I'll be visiting a friend whose Indian, and who can cook, so maybe I'll see if I can learn a recipe while I'm there. I'm not sure what I'd like to learn, possibly something vegetarian, though I've always been more fond of the Indian meat dishes. Fortunately, she's not vegetarian and she's also a good cook (at least, I think she is--I can't really recall if I had anything she made).

I'll let you know how it turned out.