Usually, restaurants sort of mix different things together to order and that’s restaurant biryani. It can be done well, but it’s not what I think of as biryani. There are some restaurants – like on Devon in Chicago – where they make huge pots of traditional biryani and then reheat to order.
This is definitely Hyderabadi-style biryani. My family is actually Punjabi, but growing up our closest family friends were Hyderabadi. This recipe is verbatim from one of those families. Believe it or not, this is the everyday version, something they would make 3 times a week! (Yes, I would be “in the neighborhood” as often as possible.)
This specific style is more accurately termed “dum ki biryani”. Dum is that final steaming step to finish cooking the rice. Within this style, it would be subclassified as “kachi”, meaning raw; i.e., the meat isn’t cooked separately first. You will see the term “kachi gosht”. Gosht usually refers to goat meat, which for some odd reason we translate to “mutton”. It is not mutton in the true English sense.
No, it’s pretty much never done. We are trained from birth to move the aromatics aside. For the uninitiated, however, I know it can be very annoying. Even now, once or twice a year, I’ll bite into a clove or cardamom pod and have my palate shot for the rest of the day.
