Telangana| The secret ingredient in Hyderabad’s biryani   

Biryani is part of Hyderabad’s brand identity. Every day a minimum of three lakh dinner plates of biryani are cooked and consumed in Hyderabad in vessels that can hold about 40 kilograms of the rice-meat-spice one-dish meal. Its flavour and aroma are a combination of the quality of ingredients, the cooking method, and as in all things creative, the experienced hand of the khansama.  

Biryani is food. Biryani is business. Biryani is part of Hyderabad’s brand identity. Every day a minimum of three lakh dinner plates of biryani are cooked and consumed in Hyderabad in vessels that can hold about 40 kilograms of the rice-meat-spice one-dish meal. Its flavour and aroma are a combination of the quality of ingredients, the cooking method, and as in all things creative, the experienced hand of the khansama.   

At Alpha Restaurant and Cafe near the Secunderabad station, which sees lakhs of footfalls as hundreds of trains stop and go, biryani packets are available day and night for train passengers on the go. At the Hyderabad Airport, where baggage check-in now takes just 45-60 seconds, Paradise Cafe has an outlet for air travellers to pick up parcels for their family and friends. Food delivery app Swiggy says it delivered 3.5 lakh biryanis on New Year’s Eve in 2022-23 across the country, with 75.4% of consumers choosing Hyderabadi Biryani.      

The Persian word birian means fried or roasted. This one word implies that the Hyderabadi biryani refers to parts of the meat at the bottom of the vessel that gets partially roasted due to high heat. Linking the dish to Persian migrants who came to India, like the Qutb Shahis who ruled between 1518 and 1687. This was followed by another wave of migration from Persia in the 1930-50s.

While there’s no consensus on what constitutes a Hyderabadi biryani, typically, it is cooked in a degh, a vessel that has a wide bottom and a tapering top so it can be sealed after the layers of rice are added, so cooking happens on dum (the steam generated inside the pot). Flaming charcoal is heaped on top of the sealed vessel for even cooking. Raw marinated meat and rice are cooked together to create the final product, kachhe gosht ki biryani (raw mutton biryani). 

The secret is big enough that the Geographical Indications (GI) tag application for Hyderabad biryani was abandoned in 2017 by the applicants after they realised they would have to share the formula and details. The Registry wanted “detailed product specifications; process and method of production (quality and hygiene practices) adopted by the producers with specific uniqueness with the comparative analysis report with other products”. This leeway on labelling has been exploited to the extent that Hyderabad biryani and Hyderabadi dum biryani can be found everywhere in the country today.    

At dozens of restaurants and cafes, the dish becomes available at noon are served late into the night. The demand is such that many of the restaurants no longer can cook on the premises and have hired halls where it is cooked and ferried to the restaurants.

The price ranges from ₹80 per plate at street corners to ₹1,250 for a clay pot at Hyderabad’s luxury ITC Kohenur. And then, there are the jumbo variants like the one served in a three-foot diameter plate in Dinehill and those served in buckets that can suffice for 10 persons or the handi for 30 persons.