Although I just became aware recently, that Telangana is a state, I can write quite a bit about both: the state and the dish.
Apparently, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh used to be one state. Hyderabad is still the capital of both states.
I visited Hyderabad 1,5 years back. 2 of my guests wished to visit their godchild and the school in Dornakal, which they supported financially through an NGO.
When I looked up Dornakal on the Map, I figured, that it was in the middle of nowhere in Telangana, 4 hours by train from Hyderabad.
To keep a long story short: During our short stopover in Hyderabad, we tried the famous Hyderabadi, before we entered a train to the rural area of Dornakal. These 2 days we spent at the NGO where not only very interesting for us, but also for the locals around. Hardly ever a foreigner comes to such a remote place. Besides Chilly plantations and granite mines, not much else seemed to be here.
To read more about our time at the NGO in Dornakal, follow this Link.
Since Hyderabad is the capital of Telangana and Hyderabad’s most famous dish is the Biryani, I decided to try to make a vegetarian version.
To stay with the truth: It took me few days, to finally commit to try to cook this quite elaborate dish.
With my cooking teacher Rekha, I already cooked this dish with a group of guests before and even wrote down the recipe on our website. But I remembered how difficult and complicated the whole process was.
So many steps with preparing every ingredient on it`s own. And once everything is prepared, the most difficult task was still waiting: Cooking everything together to make it a flavourful and beautiful one pot dish.
After my try I must say, that the preparation was actually not that complicated, as I remembered it. Although my Biryani was not as good as Rekha´s version, I am still very satisfied with the result and was happy, that it was very much eatable.
Recipe for the Vegetable Biryani
