Shada Polao
A light, casual, alterntive to "basanti" pulao
- Cooking time60 mins
Calories434kcal
Seven years ago, in 2018, we released a video that most of you will have already seen: it is our "basanti", mishti polao recipe, made following Saptarshi’s thamma’s recipe to the T. The proportion of rice to ghee to sugar that we showed in that video were all actually defined by her—she would apparently get everything weighed out at the neighbourhood grocer’s shop whenever she made this polao.
Based on that mishti polao recipe, for the past few years, we have been cooking a modified, simpler, lighter shada polao at home. It is not that one is better than the other, but that there is a time and place for both.
We make basanti polao—special, decadent, with every grain of rice glistening in ghee—when the polao itself is the star attraction. But if there is some thing else on the menu that is rich, for example, mutton, shada polao is an excellent lighter alternative to basanti polao.
There are only two key ingredients in this dish: the rice and the ghee. So make sure you select them wisely.
For the rice, use small-grained, perfumed, aged, aatop (non-parboiled) rice. Please do not make this with basmati if you can avoid it. On the day we filmed this video, we decided to go with Chine Kamini rice, which has this beautiful buttery, mellow fragrance.
For the other key ingredient, obviously, use good Bengali ghee, the nutty, toasty, brown kind. The white or light yellow ghee won’t work as well for this recipe.
Finally, even though we've played around with the proportion of the ingredients of shada polao, the foundational principles that make a polao gorgeous, fluffy, and perfectly cooked are still exactly the same as we’d outlined in our basanti polao video.
Ingredients
- 500 g fragrant, small-grained, aatop (non-parboiled) rice
- 50 g bengali-style ghee
- 6 g ginger (finely chopped)
- 8 pcs cardamom
- 3 pcs cinnamon
- 8 pcs cloves
- 4 pcs bay leaves
- 35 g cashew nuts
- 35 g raisins
- 6 pcs green chillies
- 20 g salt
- 40 g sugar
- 1080 g hot water
Method
- Wash and rinse rice, and leave it to air-dry completely.
- Once dry, transfer it to a mixing bowl. Add to it finely chopped ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves, cashew, raisins, and Bengali-style ghee. Mix until rice grains are well coated with the ghee.
- Before you start cooking, set water to boil in a pot or in an electric kettle. Also measure out the salt and sugar, and slit green chillies.
- Heat the kadai on low flame. Add the marinated rice and fry it for about 6–8 minutes until the rice takes on an opaque appearance.
- Add about 1080 g (±5%) hot water, along with the salt and slit green chillies. The amount of water is important. Add too much and polao will become soggy, add too little and it may stick to the pan.
- Cover and cook on lowest possible heat for about 10 minutes.
- Open the lid and check to see if the rice grains have cooked. Only then add the sugar. Gently fold it into the rice, taking care to ensure that you don't break the grains too much.
- Put the lid back on and steam for another 5 mins to let the sugar dissolve and any remaining moisture get absorbed into the rice. Turn off the heat and let it rest for some time before serving.
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