Jackfruit Biryani

I went to Texas to visit family in August and came back with four of my siblings’ cookbooks on loan. After a barely getting five green beans from my garden all summer, I’ve had a miraculous end-of-season glut of green beans this year. So this recipe for jackfruit biryani was the first from the group I decided to try. It’s from East Meets Vegan by Shasha Gill.

I had to do quite a bit of modification since I’m avoiding many types of nuts and all fruit at the moment. I replaced the cashews with 1/2 and 1/2 pine nuts and walnuts. Both were good. I left out the raisins and instead added a tsp of sugar to the cooking onions. That worked out really well and I didn’t really miss the dried fruit. I also used regular yogurt instead of vegan yogurt and swapped out bell pepper for the carrot, since that’s what I had.

The flavor of the dish was good and the jackfruit was a very unique aspect. But the consistency was wrong. The picture from the cookbook shoes a nice fluffy biryani with individuated pieces of rice. But my version came out very wet and mushy. More like a sticky rice compote than a biryani. I’m not sure why this happened, but next time I’d halve the vegetable stock. Also, next time I’d pull the cardamom pods out of the rice before combining it with the curry. Worth trying again with some tweaking I think.

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