Hyderabadi Kheema Pulao (minced meat rice) is a one pot simple, rich and flavorful dish best for weekends meals.
How about cooking something delish without spending too much time in the kitchen? Sounds perfect right! 🙂 This is how we like our ideal weekends to be. Something we all dream about.
What is Hyderabadi Kheema Pulao?
Kheema Pulao (minced meat rice) is a middle eastern inspired rice dish, cooked with meat and spices. Instead of the meat pieces, minced meat is used. The meat can be chicken, turkey, lamb or any other red meats. In this case I use lamb meat.
The rice and meat are cooked separately and then combined in one pot. This cooking technique varies with a ‘biryani’, where you use ‘Dum’ technique.
Refer Hyderabadi Vegetable Biryani for more details.
What is Hyderabadi Cuisine?
Hyderabad is a metropolitan city in the South of India. It’s a capital city of an Indian state of Telangana.
An old Indian city, that was for a long time ruled by Qutub Shahi dynasty, Mughal Dynasty and lastly the Nizam dynasty.
Hence, the food here has Turkish, Mughal and Arabic influences. This is in combination with the regional influences of Telugu and Marathi cuisines.
Marination holds the key
Traditional cooking always requires you to marinate your meats and vegetables well. The same is with this recipe. Allow your minced lamb to marinate for a minimum of 4 hours or best overnight. The longer the better. Remember any type of cooking involves a lot of care and patience.
You may also like Hyderabadi Lukhmi, Hyderabadi Chicken Dum Biryani, Ground Chicken Curry
Cooking in real-time
It basically involves 3 steps:
- Marinating and cooking your meat: Lamb/ turkey/ red meats, marinate the previous night. If working with chicken meat, then 1/2 to 2 hours of marination is good enough.
- Cooking the rice with whole spices
- Combining the cooked meat and rice together in one pot.
Ideal Weekend dish
Make this in bulk for second servings and mid night cravings, which helps you stay away from kitchen. Hyderabadi Kheema Pulao can be the ‘ideal family meal’ without using too many pots and pans!
To balance the richness of meat, serve it with a light salad and yogurt dip. In this case, fresh and light Avocado salad and Dahi ki Chutney (Yogurt dip).
Sharing my version of this lovely, tasty dish 🙂
Hyderabadi Kheema Pulao
Ingredients
Marinating the meat
- 1 lbs ground lamb (minced meat) or 1/2 kg lamb or goat meat. You can use minced chicken, turkey or other red meats as well
- 1-2 tsp Red chilli powder
- 1/2 tsp Turmeric
- 2-3 tbsp Lemon juice
- 1 tsp Ginger garlic paste
- Salt to taste
Cooking the meat
- 1/2 Red Onion chopped
- 1 tsp Ginger garlic paste
- 1 tsp coriander
- 1 tsp garam masala
- 2 Green chili
- 1 tbsp cooking oil
For Rice
- 1.5 cups Basmati Rice
- 5 cups water for boiling rice
- 1 tsp Ginger garlic paste
- 1 tsp cardamon pods
- 5-7 whole cloves
- 1-2 medium bay leaves
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 2 tbsp Lemon juice
- Salt to taste
For Garnish
- 3 tbsp Cilantro chopped
- 3 tbsp mint chopped
Instructions
Marination
- In a medium bowl, take the minced meat and all the ingredients under marination. Mix well and let it marinate for a minimum of 4 hours or overnight.
Cooking the meat
- In a non stick pan/ pot, heat 1 tbsp oil and add onions. Cook until they turn pink and translucent. Next add ginger garlic paste and sauté for 30 seconds or until the raw aroma disappears.
- Next add the marinated meat and cook until the water dries and oil leaves the sides.
- Now add coriander and garam masala. Mix and add green chilis.
- Remove from heat and keep it aside.
Cooking the rice
- In a large pot, bring around 5 cups of water to a boil. When the water is hot, add the spices listed under ‘For Rice’. Get it to a boil and add rice.
- Gently stir with a spoon occasionally while the rice is cooking. Don’t reduce the flame.
- Once the rice is fully cooked drain the rice in a colander. Gently fluff and keep aside.
Mixing meat and rice
- On low heat, in the same pot that rice was cooked, add cooked meat and rice and gently mix. The meat should be uniformly combined with the rice.
- Remove from heat and transfer into a serving dish. Garnish with chopped mint and cilantro.
- Serve with 'Dahi ki Chutney' (Indian yogurt dip) and a fresh salad (Avocado salad). Enjoy!
Notes
- While marinating meats, turmeric is used as a disinfectant. Hence it’s a mandatory marination ingredient.
- While cooking the meat, use minimum oil as lamb meat has high fat content, which will add to the overall oil.
Nutrition
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