In July last year, our Featured Dish was the great Chicken Tikka Biryani – and since then we’ve seen more of you order it and love it. For those of you who missed it, we’re going to take a step back and celebrate this king of Indian dishes all over again!

It’s difficult to know what is the best feature of this meal is. A biryani includes rice cooked with the meat of your choice and a vegetable curry spiced to your own specification. Should we celebrate the value for money – after all it is a meal in one? Should we celebrate the fantastic flavour created by the unique method of coming the meat and rice together? Or should we just celebrate the fact that this is an incredible dish and tell you to go and enjoy it!

A personal preference is to go for lamb as your choice of meat – our tender cooked lamb complements the dish to perfection – and then for a nice and spicy accompanying curry – after all – it is you who controls how much you have to have in each mouthful!

Our Featured Dish for July is the fantastic Chicken Tikka Biryani.

The biryani is a meal in itself – combining basmati rice with meat which are then cooked with flavoursome herbs to create a fantastic dish.  This is then served with a curry sauce of mixed vegetables to give a filling meal in every sense.

Historically, a biryani is a classic Muslim dish – and originates from the Persian word ‘Birian’.  Birian means ‘Fried before Cooking’ – and this comes from the original technique of frying the rice used in the dish in ghee.   Ghee remains a very important ingredient dish – and the lovely buttery flavour permeates through the whole dish.

This month we are encouraging you to give our Chicken Tikka Biryani a try.  We follow the recipe above – but use lovely chicken tikka – freshly barbecued in the tandoor (clay oven) to give that classic Indian taste.  Because of the combination of rice, meat and vegetable curry this is one you can enjoy without any additional dishes (that is why it is a bit more expensive than our standard dishes).

Being big eaters – this is one dish we can’t resist eating with some lovely fresh chapattis – perfect for ripping pieces off and wrapping up some little parcels of flavour – you won’t even need to use cutlery!