Review of the Mushroom Biryani Recipe
Hi,
Ray here again.
A Mushroom Biryani recipe recently arrived on the Curry Focus website and so I chose to try it out because there were 3 great reasons for making it. First, it was a curry. Second, it was a vegetarian curry and therefore healthy. Third it was a biryani curry and I just love a good biryani.
All of the biryanis that I had made in the past involved cooking the onions, spices and other ingredients and then adding the rice to the curry at the end. But this recipe got you to cook the rice first, and then add all the other ingredients afterwards. Very different. I thought that this was an odd way to cook a biryani but I’m just the cook - my weekly task is to follow a recipe to see if it works - and get a yummu meal at the end of the cooking.
As per usual, I prepared all of the ingredients before starting to do any cooking and I had a series of saucers with the ingredients ready to go (each saucer had the ingredients that were to be added at the same time). This is my regular was of preparing curry ingredients because I want to make sure that I follow the recipe correctly which means that everything has to be timed as per the recipe - no allowance for taking too long to chop up onions (I can’t chop them up like the chefs do on TV - I’m much slower so that I end up with the same number of fingers that I start with).
I started to cook the rice and I heated up the oil before the 10 minute mark arrived. Once the 10 minute cooking was over, I removed the rice from the heat and started frying the onions. I did this bit of overlapping to try and make sure that the rice was still hot when the final stages of cooking were reached.
With the onions cooked, it was simply a few steps to add the remaining ingredients, making sure that they were well mixed into the curry. I already has some water boiling before it was needed and all of the cooking steps were easily followed.
The Mushroom Biryani curry was served up to the waiting dinner guests and they eagerly sampled their meals. But something was wrong. The curry had way too few mushrooms (only 3 1/2 oz isn’t very many - this was only 6 button mushrooms). The main comments that were thrown around was that the curry was spicy and that is was bland - difficult to do both, but that was the verdict. The curry received a poor taste score of 5 out of 10 and a spice/heat rating of “medium to hot”.
What went wrong?
Firstly, I think that there should be more mushrooms. The 3 1/2 oz of mushrooms was totally lost amongst the rice. A pound of mushrooms would have been better.
Secondly, were the ingredients cooked? The chillies were definitely raw which suits me fine but not everybody wants to eat raw chillies. The spices didn’t taste crunchy but there was no way that they had blended into the curry in the way that spices do in a more regular biryani.
Or it could have been me. I may have just messed it up, although I personally don’t think so (I usually know when I’ve messed up the cooking).
I found it was a disappointing curry and will follow the more regular biryani recipes from now onwards (I won’t stop eating biryanis - they are usually delicious).
