Kacchi Biryani

Lail Hossain’s kachchi biryani is a layered mutton-and-rice dish presented as Bangladeshi cooking. Her home version uses a conventional oven and a tightly fitting pot lid, with potatoes, fried onions and hard-boiled eggs.

A ground mixture of dried chilli, cinnamon, green cardamom, cumin, clove, mace and nutmeg seasons the yogurt marinade. This selected version also includes the offered allspice and caraway seed, with pitted prunes among the layers.

The salted meat is washed and drained before marinating with yogurt, the ground spices and ginger and garlic pastes. Thinly sliced onions fry in ghee, followed by peeled potato pieces in the same pan.

Basmati rice goes into salted boiling water; the heat is turned off when it first returns to a boil. The drained cooking water is saved, with part combined with ghee. Saffron soaks separately in milk.

Potatoes and fried onion cover the marinated meat, followed by prunes, some of the ghee-water mixture, rice and saffron milk. Condensed milk is poured through indentations in the layers, followed by remaining onion and reserved liquids. After oven cooking, ready hard-boiled eggs finish the biryani, which the author offers with salad, kabab and chutney.