Hi, Ray here again.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the difference between biryani and pilau curries (basically, the rice is cooked separately to the other ingredients and then layered in a biryani whereas everything is cooked together in a pilau). Whilst writing the blog, I saw an easy looking chicken pulao curry recipe amongst the pilau curry recipe section in the Curry Focus website.
So this weekend saw me picking up a couple of chicken breasts to use to make the pilau curry. I also picked up some fresh chillies and a few good onions (I get through a lot of onions making curries).
The recipe looked pretty straightforward and I washed and soaked the basmati rice in plenty of time before it was needed.
Whilst the basmati was soaking, I cut up the chicken and mixed them up with the coriander, cumin, fennel and salt.
About 10 minutes before starting to cook, I grabbed some saffron threads (probably more than 15 but I wasn’t going to count them out individually), broke them (or rather, lightly crushed them) and put them into an egg cup with some boiling water.
I started cooking the basmati and saffron, turning on the oven to get it ready to keep the cooked rice nice and warm.
Ten minutes later I drained the rice, put it into a large casserole dish and popped it into the oven.
Then I started cooking the onions along with the aromatic cinnamon, cardamom and clove spices.
I removed about a third of the cooked onions and set them aside before adding the chicken, chillies, ginger and garlic to the cooked onions. From here onwards it was just a matter of stirring the pulao whilst it was cooking – there wasn’t a lot of liquid in the curry so I had to keep stirring it a lot.
I tested the chicken after the 15 minutes of cooking time and it was well cooked and so all was ready.
Instead of adding the cooked basmati to the saucepan, I reversed the process and added the saucepan contents to the casserole that contained the basmati and mixed everything together. All was good and I spread the previously set aside onion onto the top of the pilau as the garnish.
Then I served up the Chicken Pulao Curry to the diners (or rather, they helped themselves out of the serving dish) and everyone tucked into the meal.
And the chicken pulao curry was a hit. This is a dry curry with a nice, clean taste. There was no single spice, or ingredient, that was overpowering the tastes. The recipe originally said that it served 4 but it easily made 6 portions (2 pulao lunches for me – yummy). The spice/heat level was “medium” and the pulao received a good average taste score of 7 out of 10.
One thing about this lovely dish that puzzles me is whether it is a pilau or a biryani. The rice was not cooked with the other ingredients so it does not seem to fall into the pilau category. There again, the rice is not layered with ingredients and then further cooked so it does not seem to fall into the biryani category. Maybe it needs a separate category to itself. But when the dish tastes as good as this, maybe it doesn’t really matter what it is called.
