Calcutta’s biryani: lightly spiced chicken and saffron-and-kewra potatoes layered with basmati, perfumed with meetha ittar, sealed and finished slowly in the oven.
Untested: not yet made in this kitchen. It is here for the Rice section’s regional pages and is adapted from the source named in the Notes.
Ingredients
To marinate the chicken
- 2.2 pounds (about 1 kg) chicken pieces
- ¾ cup yogurt
- 4 tablespoons ginger paste
- 3 tablespoons garlic paste
- 4 teaspoons chilli powder
- 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
Biryani masala (grind fine)
- 10 green cardamom pods
- 10 cloves
- ½ teaspoon coriander seeds
- 5 blades mace (javitri)
- ¼ nutmeg (jaiphal)
- 2 petals star anise
- ½ teaspoon shahi jeera (black cumin)
- 1 teaspoon shah morich or white pepper powder
To cook the chicken and potatoes
- 4 tablespoons oil, to fry the onion
- 1 large onion, sliced into thin half-moons
- 1 bay leaf (tej patta)
- 1 slender stick cinnamon
- 2 teaspoons kewra water, divided
- 3 medium potatoes, peeled and halved
- 3 tablespoons oil and ghee, mixed
- ½ teaspoon grated ginger
- 1 pinch saffron in ¼ cup warm milk
For the rice
- 4 cups long-grain basmati rice, soaked 30 minutes
- 2 tablespoons salt, for the rice water
- 2 cloves, 2 cardamom pods, a 1-inch piece cinnamon, 2 bay leaves and 4 black peppercorns, tied in cotton cloth
- 2 tablespoons ghee, to toss with the rice
To layer
- ½ cup warm milk with 1 pinch crushed saffron, 1 tablespoon kewra water, 1 tablespoon meetha ittar and 1 tablespoon biryani masala
- 2 teaspoons kewra water and 2 teaspoons meetha ittar, divided between the layers
- 2 tablespoons ghee, for the top
Directions
Key ingredients
- Marinate the chicken in the yogurt, ginger and garlic pastes, chilli powder and salt for at least 1 hour.
- Grind the biryani masala ingredients to a fine powder.
- Fry the onion slices in the oil until golden and lift them out, leaving the oil.
- In the same oil, add the bay leaf and cinnamon, then the chicken shaken free of marinade, and sauté until it loses its raw colour. Add the rest of the marinade, 1 teaspoon biryani masala and a little salt. Cover and cook until almost done, adding no water.
- Uncover, raise the heat and reduce the gravy until thick, then sprinkle with 1 teaspoon kewra water. When it has cooled, skim off the oil that rises and keep it.
- Toss the potato halves in the oil and ghee with the grated ginger, add the saffron milk, a splash of water, a pinch of salt and 1 teaspoon kewra water, cover and cook until tender.
- Bring a large pot of water to the boil with the salt and the spice bundle. Add the drained rice and boil 2 minutes less than the packet time (8 minutes for a rice labelled 10). Drain, discard the bundle, and toss the rice with the ghee.
- Stir together the saffron milk, kewra, meetha ittar and 1 tablespoon biryani masala for layering. Heat the oven to 300 °F (150 °C).
- In a medium baking dish, spread the chicken gravy mixed with 1 teaspoon biryani masala. Add 3 potato halves, half the chicken, half the fried onion and half the rice. Drizzle with half the reserved oil and half the saffron milk, 1 teaspoon each of kewra and meetha ittar, and a sprinkle of biryani masala.
- Repeat with the rest of the potatoes, chicken, onion, rice, oil and saffron milk and the remaining kewra and meetha ittar. Finish with the ghee on top.
- Cover tightly with foil and bake at 300 °F for 30 to 45 minutes, in place of a sealed dum on the stove. Rest 10 minutes before serving.
Notes
Source Adapted from “Kolkata Chicken Biryani – Neha Murad’s Mom’s,” Bong Mom’s CookBook (bongcookbook.com, 2019), which credits the recipe to a reader’s mother. The author says plainly that her own attempts were “not a complete success yet” and the grains were not yet separate, so treat the timings as a starting point.
Where the source disagrees with itself, and what this version does The headnote describes Kolkata biryani with meat, potatoes and eggs, but the recipe has no egg; add 2 to 4 hard-boiled eggs to the layers if wanted. The source cooks 3 potatoes but layers “2 potatoes” per layer across two layers; here the 3 are halved and each layer takes 3 halves. Her story mentions “1 cup” of saffron milk, a mistake she names herself; the card’s ½ cup is used. The rice is printed as “4 cups (~900 g)”; 4 cups of dry basmati usually weighs about 750 to 800 g, so the cup measure is used. The source leaves the onion oil, the rice-water salt (a commenter asks how the rice gets its salt), the ghee and the yield unquantified; the figures given here fill those gaps and are not the source’s. The loose alternative to the spice bundle in the source is 1 cinnamon stick, 2 black cardamoms and 2 bay leaves, lifted out once the water boils.
Substitutes Without meetha ittar the author used kewra and rose water. Shah morich may be replaced with white pepper.
The dish The source repeats the usual story that the style came to Calcutta with Wajid Ali Shah, the exiled king of Awadh; the Rice section’s South Asia page (/rice/south-asia/) gives the two opposite versions of why the potato went in.
The photo The photograph shows a homemade Kolkata biryani with chicken, a potato and a boiled egg, which this recipe’s source leaves out.