[Anupy] On today's show we'll learn why rice is so important to Indian cuisine, and how we can transform it into an elegant, but easy to make biryani.

We'll also whip up a delicious Indian omelet.

All that and more coming up on Indian As Apple Pie.

I'm Anupy Singla, cookbook author and journalist.

I was born in North India and raised in Pennsylvania, with a foot in both cultures.

Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, I learned English from "Sesame Street," and Indian cooking from my grandfather.

Homemade Indian food always brought our family together.

It's why I'm so passionate about preserving our culture and recipes, so that everyone can learn how to make delicious Indian food at home.

This is "Indian as Apple Pie."

[announcer] This program is made possible by... Leysin American School hosts summer camps for students of all ages in scenic Switzerland.

Golden country Oriental food.

BMO Bank.

Al Sahara.

Handmade rugs.

Who can resist a one pot meal?

I know when I'm short on time, I can't.

And a biryani is the perfect choice.

It's elevated, but it's really easy to put together, and really easy to put together ahead of time.

What a biryani actually is, it's layers upon layers upon layers of spices and then your main ingredient which could be vegetables, it could be meat, and then rice, and more spices.

It is incredibly delicious.

The way you make these biryanis is you bake them.

But you first fill the pot, you put the lid on, and then you take, traditionally, some dough, and you put it around the edge and then bake it.

And once it's done, you break the seal on the dough, open the lid, then all that delicious, fragrant steam starts to come out because everything has been cooking in it's own juices.

Today we're going to show you how to make that perfect biryani at home and the sides that go with it.

Whenever I think of biryani, I always start with saffron.

You don't need too much, but just enough added to your biryani in the right way is going to make all the difference in the world.

So, we've got some saffron here.

We're going to just put it into some milk.

It could even be water.

We just want to pull out all of the aroma and the color from the saffron.

So, we'll start here.

We're going to put in a few strains.

I like to break them up.

And again, less is more.

You don't need a ton.

This process no matter how many times I do it, I just don't get enough of it because you can see the orange and the yellow hues pulling out of the saffron strains already.

Now, we're going to set this aside and forget about it for a few minutes and let it do it's job.

Let's go ahead and grab our nuts.

We like a combination of nuts and dried fruit in a biryani.

It could be anything, so, I'm using cashews.

We like unroasted, unsalted, or just give them a rough chop, about a cup here.

It doesn't have to be overly precise, but it's all about them being unroasted, unsalted, plain.

My pan is warming.

It's on medium high.

I'll just add that tablespoon and a half of ghee in there and let it melt down.

And as it melts, let's go ahead and put our nuts in there.

Now, as that roasts, we're going to take our dried fruit, in this case it's raisins.

I like to use golden yellow raisins or green raisins.

Today, though, I have black raisins.

That's what I'm going to use.

We kept it in some water and just let it soak a bit.

Let's drain it and then we'll add it to the cashews.

Add the drained raisins to the cashews.

Once the nuts have lightly browned, that will only take a few minutes, pour them into a bowl to cool.

Melt a little more ghee in the pan, and then add four sliced yellow onions, and a pinch of salt.

Lightly brown the onions over medium high heat for 10 to 12 minutes.

It might seem like a lot of onions, but don't worry, they'll cook down to be the perfect amount.

Now, the trick on the rice for the biryani, and this is important, you don't want it to cook fully.

Typically, it's one cup rice, two cups water, right, so you're doubling your water.

You want it al dente, meaning not too soft.

So, we did two cups of rice, and instead of four cups of water, we pulled it back to about three and a half cups.

Also, we added in some bay leaves as you can see.

We've got some black cardamon in here as well to give it another layer of flavor.

You just don't want anything going into your dish and layering that hasn't been zapped with a little tiny bit of flavor.

So, now we've got our components set up.

We're going to go back to our original.

Remember the saffron?

I promised you you're going to see what it looks like.

Look how beautiful that is, and that's all from just sitting here, the time that we were cooking together and we're going to take this and infuse it with all these other ingredients to build our biryani.

While I know you're looking at this display of ingredients and thinking, "Are you kidding me?"

That's what I would be thinking.

This is all fresh ingredients, lots of vegetables.

It could be anything you want.

If you want to even pull this back and just do one or two vegetables and keep it very simple, you can do that as well.

We've got some whole spices here because we're going to create a tempering for our dish.

And then we also have some additional spices over here that are ground.

We're going to start with a hot pan and we're going to put in some ghee.

As it sizzles, we'll get our whole spices in here: some cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, black cloves and some green cardamon.

Now is an opportunity to add some of that floral from the green cardamon pods.

We have some cumin going in, and some anise.

We're going to now add in some of our ginger and our garlic.

We already have it minced for you.

You can do this with a knife.

You can do it with a food processor, however you want.

Give it another stir.

Next, add a pound of chicken cut into cubes, and let that cook for eight to 10 minutes in our spices.

Add the fresh vegetables, one russet potato peeled and diced, two large diced carrots, one cup of frozen peas, one medium cauliflower cut into bit sizes pieces, about a dozen diced green beans, a diced green bell pepper, and if you like the heat, four green Thai chilis sliced lengthwise.

Then add about a quarter cup of water to help everything cook.

We want the vegetables to soften up.

We don't want them to be too mushy, but we want them to just retain all that flavor and cook down just a little bit, so once we get it in the oven, it just comes out perfectly.

After about 10 minutes, remove the lid and add one cup of plain unsweetened yogurt, 12 minced mint leaves, a quarter cup of cilantro, some turmeric powder, red chili powder, some mace spice, a couple tablespoons of garam masala, and about a tablespoon of salt.

Give it a stir, then add half of your raisin nut mixture, and half of the cooked onion.

Remove the whole spices from your rice, then layer it on top of the onion and other ingredients of the biryani.

Then layer the remaining raisin nut mixture and cooked onions on top of the rice.

Push it down, and then remember what our last step is?

Well, we want to infuse this with our saffron.

Remember we started with the saffron.

We infused that milk.

It is beautiful.

And what we want to do is just take this and pour it right over our biryani.

I don't want to lose any of that saffron in there, so I'm going to grab a spoon, pull it all out, and get it in.

Now that we have all of our ingredients in here, we're going to seal it.

Remember traditionally, we would seal it with some dough around the edges, and then bake it, and then crack it when we're ready to eat, but we're just going to use aluminum foil.

It's a little easier.

And we're going to scrunch up those ends, make sure it's really nice and tight, and then let's put the lid on it.

This is going to go into our oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit up to an hour, 45 minutes.

We'll just start it and check it.

After that, if it needs another 10 minutes, we'll let it cook a little bit more.

We are making a delicious raita.

We always love an accompaniment to our main dishes of some sort of yogurt.

And why I love raita is, it can be anything you want it to be.

We start with a really basic palate of plain unsweetened yogurt, and we build, build, build from there.

So, I've got the yogurt in here.

I just want to take a whisk and just smooth it out as best I can.

That's all you need to do is just some gentle whisks, and then we're going to put it in the bowl that we're going to serve it in.

Now, we're going to build the flavor.

We want to first though, make sure we prep our cumin seeds.

You can take just about any whole spice and you can dry roast it, and that's what we're going to do with cumin to really elevate the taste profile on our yogurt.

What you want to do with it is put it in a very dry pan, no oil, and then over a medium high flame just gently dry roast it until the internal oils, essential oils, come out of your cumin seed, and just make it beautifully fragrant.

I have some that I roasted before.

It's been sitting for about 15 minutes to cool, and you can see how beautifully brown, reddish brown, this cumin gets.

Now, there's a couple of different ways you can grind this.

You could do it in a coffee grinder that you reserve for spices.

You can grind it in a mortar and pestle.

I've got one right here, but I want to show you a way that I was taught to grind it from my grandmother in our village in India.

She would actually take two pieces of cloth.

And we've got paper towels here.

And because cumin seed is so soft, this is a way that you can grind it without having to buy all that other stuff.

So simple to do.

So, you've got either a paper towel or a clean dish cloth on the bottom.

Let's take our other paper towel or dish cloth right there, and then a rolling pin and just a little bit of muscle into it.

Oh, that looks great.

And now this, I'm just going to pour right into my yogurt.

Hopefully I don't lose any along the way.

I don't think I will.

Now let's add some salt.

This is just regular white salt.

Just a touch.

And then our red chili pepper.

This is a cayenne pepper.

A little spicier when it comes to Indian red chili.

I like it.

I'm going to add just a little bit there.

We've got some black salt.

It looks pink, but I'll talk about that later.

Now I want to add in some pineapple and grapes.

So, we're going to just cut the pineapple down in little pieces.

Let's grab our grapes as well.

Cut them into fours.

They're kind of big.

We want everything that's going into of raita to be bite sized.

We're going to top it with some dried mint, and then give it a little stir, and then one more surprise.

You see how all of this just holds together so nicely?

It's like a spiced yogurt parfait, right?

We're going to add that last layer of deliciousness.

This is that sweet surprise.

It is a tamarind chutney.

This is the topper that is going to be just so delicious, and it will just pull all of these ingredients together.

You don't need a lot, just a little bit over top.

I can't wait to serve this.

It looks absolutely beautiful.

It's just one side of many that I'm going to show you that are going to go perfectly with your biryani.

I love pomegranate.

Most people, when they think about Indian cuisine, don't always associate pomegranate with it, but visiting India at my grandmother's home in Chandigarh, we had a pomegranate tree, everyone did, and it is just such a delicious fruit.

I think part of the reason why you don't hear about it as much is because it is a little complicated to get the seeds out.

How do you get to the seeds, right?

There's just a lot of skin, and it can be very messy.

So, today I put my apron on, I'm going to get some kitchen gloves, and I'm going to show you how I open up a pomegranate.

So, the first thing I like to do before we take these little seeds out from the pomegranate is I like to just drop it a couple of times on my cutting board or a hard surface to release the seeds, to loosen them up.

You can also get a rolling pin and just gently knock it.

Alright, so they should be loosened up a bit, and then we just want to cut off the ends.

So, get a paring knife and we'll just gently just cut off the very tip there, and the bottom as well.

You already see the juice starting to pour out.

That is some of the best part of this fruit.

So, I just like to cut it over a bowl, and you go in here and find the little grooves.

It's really subtle where your knife can kind of dig in.

It's kind of like an orange, there's sections in here.

We're going to try to find them.

We don't have to be perfect, but you see as I cut in how much juice is being released.

So, we've gone ahead and cut sections.

Look at this.

Look how easily it starts to come apart.

And as we open this up, you'll see plumps of the seeds.

We want to just gently go in there and push them out really gently.

Alright, the hard work is done and now we're going to do like we do with everything in Indian cuisine.

We're going to spice this, but not with much.

We're going to keep it very light.

We're going to let the taste of the pomegranate really shine through.

So, just two ingredients we want to add: lemon, just with that citrus flavor, and just press that fork in and squeeze really hard.

So, now that the lemon juice is in there, the spice you really want to go for is called black salt, Kala Namak.

Kala means black in Hindu.

Namak means salt.

This salt comes from mines in North India and Pakistan, parts of Napal.

Now, even though it's called black salt, when you look at it, it can be a little deceiving because it kind of looks pink.

The black comes from when this gets wet, it turns darker and almost this blackish color.

So, don't worry about that.

It looks pink, but it is called black salt, and all we're going to do is we are going to sprinkle this into the pomegranate.

And what this tends to do because its got this sulfuric sort of taste profile to it, it just pops flavor for any cold salads.

You can even use it in some yogurt.

Let's give it a stir.

And that is all.

We're going to set it aside, and I'm going to show you another really cool surprise side that you're going to eat with your biryani.

You might be surprised to learn that eggs are really commonly eaten in India, and they're considered a street food.

We have a way of just taking eggs to a whole another level, using again, of course spices, but it's going to be a really fun topper of a surprise for our main dish.

So, first we've got our eggs.

You want to crack them.

I always like to add a little bit of milk in there, or a little bit of water just to loosen them up.

And let's give it a nice whisk.

A nice little scramble and now watch what we do.

It's going to be so fun.

So, the main ingredients are going to go in.

We'll start with half a chopped onion, a few minced Thai chilis, a handful of cilantro roughly chopped, half a teaspoon of turmeric powder, a teaspoon of cumin seed, half a teaspoon of red chili powder, and a little bit of salt before whisking it all together.

Add some oil to a hot pan and pour in the egg mixture letting it cook for five to six minutes.

Now, typically a biryani, you would add an egg, so I boiled egg plain, just sliced down the middle, maybe a little bit of salt, or an easy fried sunny side up egg, but this is going to be a fun little surprise for everybody.

A little different.

Alright, this is just about done, and I want it really nice and scrambled, all broken up like that.

All of those ingredients just pulling together beautifully, and that is our delicious Indian masala scramble.

That's going to be our surprise addition to that biryani.

I can't wait to see what's in here.

We've been waiting long enough.

Now, let's take the lid off.

Unwrap this thing.

Wow, look at that.

That looks amazing.

One thing that I'm really taking in as I'm smelling this, is all that saffron.

Just even that little bit just gave it so much vibrant color on top.

It really baked right in to your biryani.

I know there's a lot going on, but as long as you have a sense of purpose for everything, it's all going to work.

So, we're going to take our spatula and take it all the way down.

We're going to dig really deep to get everything from the bottom up and placed on your plate.

And it's okay if it gets all mixed up.

That's the whole point.

Look at that.

And here's our eggy surprise, our masala scramble just going on top.

Instead of just a plain boiled egg, we even took that up to another level.

Some delicious mint chutney, just because you can never get enough of ramping up those flavors.

While one-pot meals might sound boring, you can see how we've elevated it to the point where it is so intricate and now it looks so delicious.

And with all of these simple sides paired together on this one plate it becomes a meal that your family is going to ask for over and over again.

[Anupy] I'm all about making Indian cuisine more accessible.

Visit Indianasapplepie.com for more healthy, flavorful recipes, cooking tips, and much more, all rooted in tradition and simplified for our busy lives.

[announcer] This program is made possible by... Leysin American School hosts summer camps for students of all ages in scenic Switzerland.

Golden country Oriental food.

BMO Bank.

Al Sahara.

Handmade rugs.