I just watched the video-- looks amazing! Not sure about the added mint and cilantro though. It doesn’t seem to match my past (admittedly limited) experience trying Biryani, and the Madhur Jaffrey recipe does not include it.
If and when I make it (perhaps as soon as next weekend) I think I’ll leave out the mint and cilantro, especially since Mrs. solost does not like cilantro at all.
In my experience, not unusual at all. Look up recipes for Hyderabadi biryani, and you’ll find it’s common.
So, just a follow-up: I finally got around to trying my hand at making chicken biryani yesterday. Thanks to puzzlegal and pulykamell for the recipe suggestions!
I did a combination of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe and the recipe from the ‘Andy Cooks’ video that pulykamell posted, using what I thought were the best techniques from each one. For example, I added bay leaves and cardamom to the oil that I fried the onions in, and saved the onion oil to drizzle over the biryani before baking in the oven, per the Jaffrey recipe. And per the ‘Andy Cooks’ recipe, I added cumin seeds, cardamom, salt, a cinnamon stick and a chile to the water I pre-cooked the rice in to help add an extra dimension of flavor to the rice. I also added fresh chopped mint per the ‘Andy Cooks’ video, but not cilantro, since Mrs. Solost hates cilantro.
The result? I’m not going to lie, I’m…not sure. It was…good. Was it “spend an entire day making it” good? I don’t know. I haven’t had biryani from a restaurant in a very long time, so I didn’t have much of a frame of reference. Part of it may have been that thing where, when you make a complicated dish for the first time, and your expectations are high, it’s extremely difficult to judge your own creation. Know what I mean? Part of it may have been as simple as, despite salting the marinade and the rice water, I may not have salted enough. Adding salt afterward helped, but it wasn’t the same as the flavor of salt being diffused and baked into the meal.
But again, it may just be an example of me being my own worst critic. My younger son, for what it’s worth, described it as ‘fabulous’, which is NOT a word he normally uses to describe anything. His usual judgements of my meals are ‘it’s good’ (normally his highest praise); ‘it’s ok’; or ‘I don’t like it’.
Looking forward to a reevaluation when I have leftovers for lunch today 
Gumbo involves plenty of prep dicing up the Holy Trinity ingredients, celery, onions, and bell peppers, but also requires a dark brown roux and that takes a good bit of time. I do it in a pan, stirring constantly for 20 minutes or more to get to the full dark richness. I’ve heard about baking it Dutch oven and I tried once long ago and had to finish it on the stove top anyway. When I make gumbo I leave an afternoon open for all the prep work.
Cajun and Creole cooking is so freestyle it’s hard not to be ‘authentic’. I can’t find decent Andouille sausage around here, I use Italian as a substitute, add some wine and smoked paprika into the dish to get those flavors. I doubt anyone can taste the final product and tell the difference, and I’ve never had anything close to complaint.
Having one made it myself, I’ve never found a restaurant biriyani that met my expectations.
But I’ve only made it twice. So I’m not convinced it’s worth the effort, either.
Oh man, I do like talking gumbo. It’s one of my all-time favorite go-tos, and I never make it quite the same.
RE: the roux, I’ve had luck getting a rich brown roux quickly by stirring constantly in a small pan on high heat. You have to be very careful to stir frantically so as to not burn it, and even lift the pan off the heat if it seems to be getting too hot, but I can get a rich brown roux in maybe 10 minutes tops.
I’ve also heard, but have not tried, a technique where you spread the dry flour in a thin layer onto a cookie sheet or similar and toast it in an oven. Then you add it to your butter or oil at gumbo-making time for instant brown roux. I bet this is how some restaurants make their roux.
One of my occasional gumbo secret ingredients is adding allspice. I’ve never seen allspice as an ingredient in any gumbo recipe I’ve ever seen, except from a series of gumbo recipe varieties that @pulykamell shared in another thread. A ‘gumbo with greens’ recipe from that list, which I made, had allspice as an ingredient. Which led me to a realization: some local restaurant gumbo that I really liked, from a chain of higher-end Coney restaurants in our area, of all places, must use allspice. The combo of well-browned roux and allspice makes for a killer gumbo. When I make this version, it’s strictly Cajun-style with no tomatoes. because adding tomatoes seems to overpower or ‘neutralize’ the allspice flavor.
Chili. I add a little to chili. I don’t think I’ve ever tried it with gumbo, have I? (There’s a little bit of a period of time where my brain was kinda scrambled, so I suppose it’s possible I mentioned it, but being currently of sound mind (I think), I do not recall ever using allspice in gumbo, just chili. That’s the most recent time I mentioned it, in the chili thread from a month or two or so ago.)
Oh yeah, I can see adding allspice to chili. It works really well with beef dishes. And with generally spicy dishes, as we both know well from making jerk recipes.
Someone posted the first known stroganoff recipe by Elena Molokhovets in another recipe thread once. It calls for allspice and mustard, but not the mushrooms which are pretty standard in later recipe versions. I tried making it, and I didn’t think the mustard really worked that well or added much to it, but the allspice was a terrific addition. I since have made stroganoff several times with allspice but not mustard, and adding the mushrooms back. Another great go-to. Makes a good weekday meal with ground beef instead of slow-cooked chuck, which I’d probably use on a weekend version.
I don’t use allspice in Stroganoff, but I’m going to try it out. It gives a distinctive flavor to Swedish meatballs that should work as well with Stroganoff.
The Indian grocery store here sells thousands of foil packets of prepared Indian food, paneer in spinach and so on. The guy who runs it told me most Indians buy these, eating ‘regular food’ in addition. Jarred sauces are popular, too. Cooking from scratch with all those ingredients is for special occasions. Grandmothers more likely to know how to make authentic dishes.
Yeah, my suggestion for allspice was from your recent thread on making award-winning chili (where you do say you used it, too):
I checked around, and I don’t see myself suggesting using it for gumbo. It feels a little odd to me, but a subtle spicing wouldn’t hurt, I don’t think. Polish soups and stews (and sausage) often use a bit of allspice in them, and it’s not really noticeable. Then again, my mom would put like 3-5 whole allspice berries for an enire gallon of soup, so it’s not going to be forward in the palate.
Ah yes, so I did. That was the day of the NFC Championship game the Lions lost, so my memory of that day was a bit scrambled from the awful loss (and a beverage or two) 
I just searched around a bit and couldn’t find it either, but you did post several gumbo recipes in a thread awhile back. One of them was a ‘gumbo with greens’ recipe that had allspice as an ingredient. I found a reference I also made to it in this thread from Sept. '22, so it predates this:
Anyway, I will have to do some more searching, because that gumbo with greens recipe was good.
ETA: found it!
Here’s the ‘gumbo with greens’ recipe leading from that link (actually called GUMBO Z’HERBES). It only calls for a grand total of a mere 2 allspice berries, yet it was my inspiration to experiment with allspice in gumbo.
Ah, yes! How funny. I literally have the book that it’s from sitting on my desk – it’s from The New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook by Deirdre Stanfoth. I forget what I was researching that I took out of the bookshelf, but there it is. It does list “2 allspice” in the recipe (in addition to “2 cloves”) for enough gumbo z’herbes to serve 10-12 people. I didn’t think of it when you said “gumbo” as it’s mostly like a Southern greens recipe on steroids rather than what I think of as “gumbo,” but that is what it’s called.
This particular book has recipes from various old school New Orleans restaurants (the book is copyrighted 1967), and the gumbo z’herbes recipe is from a place called “Dunbar’s”) I’m not sure if it’s related to the current Dunbar’s Creole Cuisine, as that one says it was established in 1986.
Oh, wow, I just starterd Googling “Dunbars louisiana 1967” and this popped up, with reference to the aforementioned cookbook:
Pasta con le Sarde
A recipe, though when I made it it was a printed one from a relative. It seems a very busy task in making it requiring close monitoring of the cooking process with lots of tweaking. This leaves very little time for preparation “as you go” even though I did do some preliminary preparation, though clearly not enough. Much more doable with two ( or more ) people. I just remember being constantly on my feet and moving about for the better part of two hours.
While delicious to the point of being swoon-worthy, I won’t make it again. What a PIA: it made my gun-shy of cooking anything complicated again. It’s a shame because after reading through this whole thread there’s some great stuff I’d like to try.
Nice! I have a copy of The Picayune Creole Cookbook, originally printed around 1900. Mine is a 13th edition from 1966 in near-mint condition I bought at a garage sale years ago. As much a historical document as a working cookbook.
Nice. The one I’ve been meaning to get for awhile now, but keep forgetting to hunt down is River Road Recipes, which has been described as the Bible of Southern Louisiana cooking. I have Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Cooking and Donald Link’s Real Cajun (I bit more contemporary), and those have served me well. Still, though, my first resource is gumbopages.com. It has been largely unperturbed since I started using it in the early 00s. The actual recipe indexes (a click or two in) and recipe pages I swear have not at all changed design since those days, possibly even the 90s.
Oh yeah, that site definitely brings brings back nostalgia for the simple, carefree days of 90s web design. I can almost hear the modem sounds 
Will have to explore that site when I have more time later, thanks!
I enjoy cooking and have made many, many multi-course meals for friends and family. I see that this is an old thread that I may have already contributed to but I’m sure it wasn’t my latest dive into complicated food: Julia Child’s signature Beef Bourguignon.
It wasn’t hard but it was so, so, soooooooooooooo many steps that dirtied so, so, soooooooooooooooooooo many dishes. And not a few steps seemed superfluous, like boiling the lardons before frying and browning the pearl onion, making a kinda sauce out of it and then getting rid of all the sauce and herbs just to put the browned onions in the stew.
The stew was very good but I’ve made beef stew almost as good with one quarter the time, steps and dirty dishes.
Interesting, thanks! I’ve wanted to try Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon just to say I did it, but I’ve suspected what you found out, that it’s not really worth all the extra work.
An interesting side-thread to this might be, what time-consuming dishes turned out to actually be worth all the work and time? For example a recipe I mentioned in the OP, Spicy Beef Rendang. It’s one of my favorite things to make when I have the time, and it takes about 4 hours. There is no shortcut, because it has to be cooked long and slow to evaporate the coconut milk. I tried an Instant Pot shortcut recipe once, and it was terrible.
Good BBQ is another example that there’s no shortcut for.
Yeup, the reason I made it was to have made Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon and I did it! For that it was worth it. Won’t be doing it again, though.