very restaurant in Trivandrum claims to make the best biryani. Most of them are wrong. We are not going to claim ours is the best either — that is the kind of statement that always sounds insecure — but we will tell you exactly what we do, and exactly what we have refused to change for twenty-one years, and you can decide for yourself.
The recipe below is, with a few omissions our suppliers would not forgive us for printing, the recipe we use today. It is the same one we used in 2005. The kitchen is bigger. The team is bigger. The recipe has not moved.
The rice
We use a single estate’s basmati, aged for fourteen months. The estate is in Haryana. We have been buying from them since 2008. The difference between fourteen-month-aged basmati and the rice you buy at a grocery store is the difference between a good guitar and a guitar that has been played for thirty years — both produce notes; only one tells the truth.
The rice is soaked for exactly forty-five minutes in cold water with a tablespoon of salt and three crushed green cardamoms. Not forty. Not fifty. We have tested this enough times to know that the window is real and narrow. Too short and the grain is brittle. Too long and the starch begins to leach. Forty-five minutes is, irritatingly, correct.
KITCHEN NOTE
We use the same brass pot for the rice soak that we used in 2005. It is dented. Nobody is allowed to replace it. There is no rational explanation; we just do it that way.
The masala
We pound our masala by hand every morning. Not because it tastes different — though it does — but because it takes ninety minutes longer than a blender, which forces us to start at five-thirty in the morning, which forces us to be in the kitchen, which forces us to taste things. The masala is the alarm clock.
The spec is unromantic. Coriander seed, cumin, black pepper, mace, nutmeg, four kinds of chilli, green cardamom, black cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, fennel, star anise, dried curry leaf. Ratios we will not print. The chilli mix is the only thing that has changed in twenty-one years — we shifted to a Guntur-Byadgi blend in 2014, after a long conversation with a supplier in Andhra who very politely told us we were wrong.
He was right. We were wrong. The biryani got better.
A recipe you have held for twenty years is not a recipe. It is an argument with the past, conducted in public, every single day.
The meat
We use mutton from a single butcher in Chala market who we have known since 1998. He cuts it the way we like it — slightly larger than the standard biryani cut, because the larger pieces hold their juice through the dum process. The marinade is yogurt, ginger, garlic, our masala, lemon, and a small amount of papaya paste to soften the connective tissue. Six hours minimum, eight hours ideal.
We have, twice in two decades, used a different butcher. Both times we went back inside the week. There is no story here, no betrayal, no scandal — just the slow realisation that consistency of supply is half the dish.
The dum
The dum is the only part of the process that requires neither skill nor judgement. It requires patience. We seal the pot with wet dough, put it on a tawa over the lowest possible flame, and leave it for forty-five minutes. Then we take it off the flame and let it rest, sealed, for another fifteen minutes. The total cook is sixty minutes. It is the same sixty minutes that biryani has needed for three hundred years.
The dough seal is purely functional, but the kitchen treats it as ritual. A junior cook is taught to make the seal in their first week. They get it wrong for about a month. By the time they can do it without thinking, they have, by definition, been at Imperial Kitchen for thirty days — and we have, by accident, taught them what kitchen patience feels like.
The argument
Every Thursday, the senior kitchen meets to discuss the week. We have, on average, three operational decisions to make. One of them, since 2017, has been whether to start serving the biryani in individual portions instead of in the large brass pots we use today. The brass pots are heavier, less efficient, more labour-intensive, harder to plate, and produce a slightly less consistent rice-to-meat ratio than portion-cooked biryani would.
They also produce the moment, at table, when the server lifts the lid. The steam comes up. Three people lean forward at once. Someone says oh without realising they have said anything. It is, by a wide margin, the most theatrical thing we do.
We have voted to keep the brass pots, every Thursday since 2017, by a margin of one. The vote is always the same. Nobody changes their mind. The argument continues anyway. This, possibly, is the recipe.
What we will not tell you
The ratio of meat to rice. The amount of saffron. The specific yogurt brand. The exact dough recipe for the seal. The name of the butcher in Chala — he has asked us not to print it, and we are not in the business of disobeying suppliers who have been right twice as often as we have.
Make the biryani anyway. It will not be ours. That is fine. Ours has had twenty-one years to become what it is — yours will, in time, become its own. The point of writing this is not to give you the recipe. It is to give you the temperament. Patience, hand-pounded masala, a brass pot you refuse to throw away, a Thursday meeting that never resolves. The biryani is just what happens around it.