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Recipes with chinigura

3 recipes that use chinigura, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Ilish polao, takes 75 minutes. It is most often cooked with bay leaves, cinnamon stick and ginger paste.

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Ilish polao

Monsoon is hilsa season: as the fish run up the Meghna and the boats come back heavy into Chandpur ghat and the Barisal river markets, the richest cooks make ilish polao, a fragrant rice cooked in the oil left from frying the fish and in a light stock from the head and tail. Fried hilsa steaks are tucked into the rice to finish in the steam, so they stay moist and take on the scent of cardamom and bay. It is a dish for the hilsa season and for honoured guests, served with fried onions, a wedge of lime and a green chilli. The usual misjudgement is stirring once the fish is in; the steaks are fragile and fall apart into bones. Chef's tip: keep the oil the fish was fried in, because the whole dish depends on that hilsa-scented fat.

75 minBangladeshiFishGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Morog polao

If kacchi rules the big Old Dhaka weddings, morog polao is the dish that shows up at holud evenings, aqiqah lunches and family dawats across the rest of the city, a pale, fragrant rice with whole joints of chicken tucked inside. The chicken is first braised in a mild sauce of yoghurt, ghee and fried onion, and then the rice is cooked in that sauce loosened with milk, so the grains turn creamy-white, soft and perfumed with cardamom and kewra. It is not meant to be fiery; the heat comes from a few whole green chillies and the sweetness from crisp onions scattered over the top. A frequent slip is boiling the rice too hard after the milk goes in, which makes it catch and stick to the base. Chef's tip: fry a whole bowl of onions to a deep gold first and keep half for the garnish, because the onions are as important as the chicken.

90 minBangladeshiChickenGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Old Dhaka beef tehari

Tehari is the everyday cousin of kacchi, the rice that office workers queue for at lunchtime in the narrow lanes of Nazira Bazar and Bangshal, scooped from huge dented degs onto plates with a slice of cucumber and a green chilli. Instead of big pieces of mutton it carries small dice of beef, cooked down first in sharp mustard oil and then steamed with short-grain aromatic rice, so every mouthful has a bit of meat in it. The smell is the giveaway: mustard oil, bay leaf, a little kewra and plenty of slit green chillies that soften into the rice. Where cooks go wrong is adding the rice before the beef is truly tender, because the meat will not soften any further once the grains go in. Chef's tip: cut the beef no bigger than a sugar cube and use chinigura or kalijira rice if you can find it; basmati works but gives longer, drier grains.

90 minBangladeshiMeatGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Goes well with chinigura