Indian Cuisine: How to Make Biryani - as part of the food and kitchen series by GeoBeats.

Hi, I am Rinku. I teach Indian cooking classes out of my home based cooking school, "Cooking with Rinku". For the chicken biryani, I have the chicken cooking in spices here. What we add to this is rice that is been pre soaked with spices, we add it in. Biryani is a dish that came to India actually from Persia. Biryani comes from the word "biryan", which means "to fry". The rice to add beauty to it is also streaked in different colors so the first rice that I added in is white, this gets mixed with the chicken, and the saffron streaked rice gets in later. All of this goes in. The chicken already has the sauce which would give the rice moisture to cook.

The tricky part of this dish is to make sure that you have just enough moisture, but not too much. I have fried onions that get added in. I cover the rice. It is important to have a heavy cooking pot with a tight fitting lid, and I lower the heat, and we let the rice cook. So we have now, about forty minutes later the chicken biryani's done. You add it carefully add enough of the rice and the chicken. Serve it carefully, and we are all set. You can garnish it with a little cilantro and your chicken biryani is ready to eat. This is a one dish meal as you can see, because it has the rice, chicken and spices all together here. So most of the time people eat it with just a little yogurt on the side.