Chicken with Lentil Rice (Adas Polo Morgh)
When you want biryani, but don’t want to buy all those ingredients
Time: 2 Hours (+4 Hours optional chicken Prep)
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Difficulty: 2/5
I really enjoy chicken biryani, but making it at home is always a pretty big undertaking. When I saw this recipe in the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Cookbook, It reminded me of biryani, but simpler. I don’t really expect the flavors to be similar at all, but the overall experience should be reminiscent. Both are chicken and spiced basmati rice cooked together, after all.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
I didn’t have any issues finding any of the ingredients for this recipe. Everything is pretty standard and easy to find. The recipe gives you the option of using a whole chicken or just chicken thighs, but I went ahead and used a whole chicken. I think it saves a few dollars compared to 8 chicken thighs.
Tools:
Large Pot or Dutch oven
Cooking Review:
Chicken Prep: 10 minutes + 3 Hours 50 minutes dry brine
To prep the whole chicken, I broke it down into 8 pieces and seasoned it with salt and cumin. I put the chicken in a bowl and let it sit in the refrigerator for almost 4 hours.
Cook lentils & Prep: 28 minutes
One of the ingredients for this recipe is actually cooked lentils, so I had to go ahead and cook the dried lentils that I had. I also sliced the onion and chopped the dates. I measured out the rice, raisins, and chicken broth so that they’d be ready for later.
Sear Chicken: 16 minutes
After heating some olive oil in a large pot, I seared the chicken pieces in two batches. Watch batch took about 8 minutes and I flipped the pieces half way through. After searing, I set the chicken aside on a plate and poured out the excess oil in the pot,
Cook Onions: 11 minutes
I melted the oil in the pot and added the sliced onions along with the cumin and other aromatics. I only ended up cooking this for 11 minutes to get the onions browned and tender instead of the 25 minutes the recipe suggests.
Toast & Cook Rice: 50 minutes
I increased the heat and added the rice to toast for about a minute before adding the raisins and dates to soften for about 2 minutes. The chicken stock and lentils were added next and brought to a boil, which took about 5 minutes. I seasoned the mixture with salt until it was uncomfortable salty then added the chicken back in. I lowered the heat and covered the pot with a lid with a towel wrapped around it to prevent condensation dripping back onto the chicken. I let it cook for 40 minutes before turning off the heat.
Finishing: 10 minutes
To finish, I just had to leave the pot on the stove covered to steam for 10 minutes before serving.
Analysis:
I really like this rice. It actually picked up a lot of chicken flavor and was well seasoned. The dates and raisins add some nice sweetness, too. As for the chicken, it was very tender and actually has a nice flavor despite being seasoned with just salt and cumin. Honestly, everything was cooked pretty much perfectly and seasoned very well. However, there’s nothing mind blowing about the flavors. Everything is well balanced and mellow, which I think works very well in this dish. A couple things that I noticed are that the chicken skin wasn’t crispy, despite the towel on the lid to prevent drips, and that a lot of the rice on the very bottom end up burnt. I don’t really mind the skin not being crispy, but no one likes burnt rice. Not sure how to prevent this without some sort of agitation in the cooking process. I’m going to give this recipe a 8/10. I liked it a lot. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty simple and gives you a lot of tasty food from your 2 or so hours of work.
