“Biryani is an emotion,” said a friend of mine from across what some consider “enemy” borders in India, a country that once existed together with present-day Pakistan as part of a larger entity, and that has strong thoughts on some of our food claims. In four words, she captured why I started cooking biryani with the help of Shan’s Sindhi Biryani mix.
In my home country, biryani is everywhere: Whether you spend your day at school, work, a funeral, or a wedding, you’ll find biryani there. That’s because this generous meat and rice dish is many things to millions of us, whether a homecoming for the homesick, a moment of pause for those mourning, a fuel for celebration, or a meal to share with those who don’t have enough.
Shan, a Pakistani packaged spice mix company with humble beginnings, is available and in high demand in dozens of countries, including India, because it connects people to dishes that hold great cultural and often personal significance. Shan spices, easily stashed in my suitcase, were how I created a piece of Karachi in five different cities and three different countries. If biryani is an emotion, then the Shan biryani box is one way to express it.
Over the years, I’ve realized that Shan helped democratize a cuisine that used to require having the money and space to keep 30-odd dry spices on hand. With Shan, you could find the ingredients to dozens of dishes perfectly proportioned in one sanitized airtight packet for the cost of a few dollars.
Shan sells several types of biryani mixes online and in South Asian stores. My go-to remains the Sindhi Biryani mix with chicken; the dish looks like a Jackson Pollock of spicy, bright meat curry, or salan, as Pakistanis call it, distributed throughout a canvas basmati rice. It’s the one that feels like ghar ka khana (home-cooked meals) and somehow hews close to the piles of biryani I have eaten over the years in Karachi.
The back of the box has pictures and quantities of the ingredients you need. I always throw a pack of dried plums in my cart — it’s not on the list because dried plums are included in the box, but making biryani is all about being extra.
You can make Sindhi biryani with beef or chicken (although I’ve also made it with shrimp). I try to get my chicken from an Iranian or a South Asian butcher, skinned and cut into 16 pieces, but you can also get a pack of bone-in thighs from the closest supermarket and remove the skin. Trust me, you don’t want skin and you definitely don’t want boneless chicken — even the humble chicken marrow has fat that adds complexity to the dish.
The branding on the Shan box still reeks of the early Y2K digital design era. But it’s a proud emblem of another kind of democratization: Now, Pakistani grand dames could no longer gatekeep flavor. Women of my mother’s generation could suddenly achieve some rather complex Pakistani dishes, even tailor them to their liking, without needing to have the older aunties lord a recipe over them. Plus, they were able to claw back some time by eliminating the spice mise en place.
I still remember the first time I cooked the biryani on the back of the Shan box. I was in a city far from Karachi, craving home. The six-step instructions, printed in English, Urdu, and Spanish, somewhat presume that you are familiar with South Asian cooking techniques, and lulled me into the false belief that this would be easy.
Enter my mum, the now-reigning matriarch back home, and my main man Jamil, who has been cooking and caring for my family since I was a teenager. They packaged a biryani master class into WhatsApp-sized bites just so I could recreate the emotion of belonging via a single plate of food.
Over multiple and at times frustrating WhatsApp chats — which I will run into a burning building to save — I realized onions are easier to burn than brown, and perfect biryani rice needs you to slow down and watch water boil. The first few times I made Shan’s version, I referred to my WhatsApp manual and tweaked the box’s recipe to suit my cravings and my kitchen, which lacked a massive aluminum deg, a kind of cooking pot.
I’ve workshopped some parts of the recipe a lot. Instead of frying the onions until they’re light golden, as the recipe calls for, I aim for a tawny color because I’ve found that it elevates the yogurt chicken salan past any residual tanginess or sweetness. I test the oil temperature by adding a slice of onion to it to see if it rises to the top, then tip in the rest in batches to avoid burning my hand in the steam.
If stirring and watching onions fry isn’t your thing, you can buy fried onions, which I’ve also done. By my math, two medium onions equal about one cup of store-bought fried ones. I just halve the oil and add the fried onions for a few hot seconds. It’s another shortcut some South Asian grannies would frown upon, but it does the job.
How I cook the chicken has also evolved. After underestimating how fast the chicken breaks down while it cooks, I realized that combining the spices, Greek yogurt, and ginger in a bowl before adding them to the pot will prevent the chicken from getting bruised while I try to mix everything together. This is also when I usually throw in one or five dried plums and sometimes make the executive decision to double the aloo.
Aloo is a funny thing to fight over, but I have seen dinners come undone over heated discussions about the place of potatoes in biryani, and grown men argue with biryaniwallas about getting too few aloo on their plate. Live a little, add more potatoes.
For me, heat is as important as the spuds. The box’s mix has a solid flavor punch, but for more heat, I reduce the rice by a third or add another third from a second Shan box. The biryani will be a smidge bolder, with enough basmati to still balance each bite. You want good basmati that has a nuttiness and goes miles in achieving the fluffy separate grains that are a biryani trademark. I also learned that you can’t parboil rice unless you are fastidious about rinsing and undercooking it. I test it like pasta — pinch a grain and if you can feel two or so hard spots at the center, it’s ready.
Because I opt for more spice, I lean into the herbaceousness of the mint and coriander that are part of the Shan recipe, along with lemons (my twist) and tomatoes. I remove half the thick chicken curry and sprinkle half the herb-veg bouquet before repeating the layers: rice, chicken, herbs, and rice.
The finished dish looks different in every region that calls biryani its own, with varying textures and flavors. In my own kitchen, I use saffron to add a yellow tinge to the rice. I soak two pinches in a few teaspoons of warm milk to extract the color and flavor, make holes in the layers of rice with a chopstick, and pour it in.
I used to get caught up on perfection, and the moment of taking the lid off the pot would leave me wrecked with nerves. But now I just inhale the trademark biryani aroma before I start taking correction notes. That first hit is what just might live in my limbic system, an irrevocable connection to this shapeshifting emotion in a plate.
Halima Mansoor is a breaking news editor who sees the kitchen as a revolutionary space. In addition to documenting food, she is on a mission to trace her food heritage, explore immigrant cuisine, and initiate more people into the Marmite club.
