Hyderabadi Biryani -- The hunt begins.

I've set myself a goal of learning to make a good Hyderabadi biryani before I leave India.

Best I can tell this is the general process:

1. Marinate some meat and cook it a bit (cook it maybe half-way).
2. Soak some rice and maybe cook it a bit (half-way).
3. Layer the rice and meats in a big pot.
4. Add some additional spices and some ghee.
5. Cover tightly and cook for an additional 30mins until the rice and meats are both done.

This general recipe is deceptively simple I would say, which mean that the devil is in the details.  My time in India has shown me some good and lots of mediocre-to-bad biryani.

I do not intend to learn to make mediocre biryani.  ;-)

Some things I know already:
I will make chicken and mutton styles. Probably chicken more often than mutton.
Boneless mutton. Dark chicken meat. 
I will not bother with vegetarian biryani. 
I will use fresh whole spices, no mixes. (I'm throwing out all my old spices today.)
Saffron will be used, not colorings.
I will not use prepared garlic-ginger paste. That stuff is just nasty.
I will not worry about how much ghee goes in.  If I wanted to watch my calories, I wouldn't be making biryani.
I like it spicy. Most Indian food is not spicy enough for me but Andhra food (i.e. from Hyderabad) is.
I'm sensitive to over-salted food, so I'll probably be cutting back a bit on that part of most recipes.
Getting the rice properly cooked half-way before assembly will be a key to success.  Overcooking it will result in the mush that I've been served too many times in corporate canteens and cheaper restaurants.  Here's what Petrina Verma Sarkar says about this step:

"Cook till almost done. To determine when it has reached that stage, remove a few grains from the pot and press between your thumb and forefinger. The rice should mostly mash but will have a firm whitish core."

Manila Williams says:

You have to par cook the rice (meaning 3/4 cooked and rest will get cooked later). Do not over boil the rice. To check if the rice is done you can take a grain of rice out and press in between your thumb and forefinger. If the grain breaks into 3 parts, it means your rice is cooked just right.

Here's a promising recipe because it appears to be translated from another language (Telugu hopefully), and has typical Indian names for most items. I may give this one a try.  You have to like something that uses 3 t. chili powder for only 1/2 kg of meat.  Something is not right with the temperatures though.  Maybe mixing up Fahrenheit and Celsius?

Here is one I probably won't be trying.  1/2 t of chili powder? "Saffron Color".  Uhm, no thanks.

Recently there was an otherwise insipid article locally in which Sanjay Bahl of Royal Orchid Hotels made a telling comment: "Use a mix of cream, butter and saffron and pour it over the rice and cover it with a thin layer of par boiled rice after which you cover it with a lid and place it on dum."  I have yet to find a recipe that calls for cream or butter. In my experience, the fancy restaurants and hotels in India use WAY too much cream.  It's loaded into every curry dish to make it thicker and richer. Here I suspect the same thing is happening with biryani.  I can't imagine someone actually using cream and butter to make a biryani at home.  Am I wrong?  I suspect he's taking the saffron milk and using cream instead. 

This looks like a very good process in this video from Pakistan with Sanjeev Kapoor on TV1 showing the assembly and some of the details of the dum (vessel) loading.  He makes a seasoning potli (like a french bouquet garni) for the boiling of the rice.  He shows just how to layer in the meats and rice, and he uses a lot of yogurt (curd) to marinate the meat, which probably also makes the rice much richer in the end as it cooks off. This looks a lot like what I thought would be in the right recipe. Might start with this one as a basis.

Another video showing a mutton version, with tomatoes added to the meat while it cooks. Also he uses a 1:1 water:rice ratio to "partially cook" the rice in a rice cooker. The assembly here lacks a little in the "atmosphere" department, but it looks like they're having a huge party.

And on a lighter note: A rap about Hyderabadi Biryani. Awesome stuff that one...