Tempeh Biryani

Author Notes

On the Indian subcontinent, the rice-based dish is almost sacred. Dare to call anything without mutton (or, at best, chicken) a biryani and you’ll hear “It’s a pulao!” before you can even finish the sentence. I tried it once on Instagram. That it boosted the engagement on my post was a bonus, but only a digital writer will understand that. For everyone else, a biryani with mutton is the real deal, and everything else is just a rice-based side dish.

While potato is a regular feature in Kolkata-style biryanis, it is always accompanied by juicy chunks of lamb, and I'm a vegetarian. Then there's paneer biryani, but that's too mainstream for my liking. So one leisurely Sunday morning, I tried my luck with tempeh. Tempeh is essentially richly textured, fermented chunks of soybean; the reason it works well as a protein in a biryani is because of its intrinsic ability to absorb flavor. Unlike peas or carrots, tempeh gets denser when you cook it, and it can slurp up a lot of marinade within a short period.

In the Mughal period—one theory says biryani originated in their royal kitchens—vegetarians who mingled with the court, especially the Kayasthas or the Rajput kings, always sneaked vegetarian meat alternatives into Mughlai dishes. Take, for instance, raw jackfruit recipes that lead us to beautiful biryanis, raw banana and moong dal that were folded into kebabs, and wheat gluten used to make keema, or ground "meat." So there was one thing I was certain of (and that gave me courage when developing this recipe): North Indian cooking had a history of dabbling with faux meats long before the term became trendy.

Ordinarily, while cooking a meatless biryani, I'd marinate the vegetable (mostly raw jackfruit) for a few hours and cook it exactly like mutton, sautéing and then finishing it with parboiled rice. However, to make a tempeh biryani, I added one extra step: I grilled big chunks of marinated tempeh to supplement my biryani base, ensuring they were fully done and wouldn’t leave a raw aftertaste.

While traditionally a Lucknowi-reminiscent biryani would be cooked in a dum pukht style, tightly sealed in dough so no steam can escape, this tempeh biryani is a fairly simple affair. The tempeh is precooked, and so finishing everything together with the lid-on method will do the trick. Though it's simple, this biryani certainly isn't light on flavor—notice how the smokiness of the tempeh from the grill pan mixes with the fresh notes of rosewater to vie for your attention.
—Sonal Ved