Topic: Chicken Tikka Biryani with a Madras sauce

[George]

I've definitely tried George, but alas no success yet. In principle it's easy. You heat up some curry base with your choice of meat, add some biryani masala, bung in a portion of cold pilau rice and stir fry until the curry sauce is absorbed by the rice. Then of course you can add raisins, almond slivers etc. and top with any combination of slices of tomato, cucumber and boiled egg to make it like your local version. In practice, unsurprisingly, it's the biryani masala that's the problem as I just can't seem to get a blend that's right. In desperation I recently picked up a jar of biryani masala from Tesco and I'lll give that a go when I have time

YF

Many thanks for your report on work-in-progress. It sounds like the spicing (masala) is the key, then, from what you've found. I hoped that one might not need to add much more than the base sauce, if the base sauce already tastes good on it's own, like MarkJ's did when I made it. But again, not having tried to make a BIR chicken biryani yet myself, it sounds like I'm wrong. The take-away I visited recently also added lots of different bits and pieces (I don't know what) so I guess it's not as simple as I'd first hoped. I'll save my money on any almond slivers, tomato, cucumber, boiled egg etc (the finishing touches, more for appearance than taste, I assume), until the basic taste of the core element - the 'coated' rice and chicken mix - is like at a BIR. 95% of hundreds of BIR chicken biryanis I've had over many years, at dozens of different BIRs have all tasted very, very similar - almost as close as one Big Mac tasting virtually identical to another Big Mac, any time, any place.

Regards
George