I love biryani. I love it so much that I learned how to make it by following the recipes for chicken and vegetable biryani from the Vah Chef youtube videos. The guy is a little crazy, but he’s very passionate about cooking so its fun to watch his videos and you learn a ton of cooking tricks. In his vegetable biryani video Chef Vah suggests people use store bought masala. Instead of buying store bought masala I create my own biryani mix using the spices in my kitchen. The biryani mix I use is also from the Vah Chef, specifically from his chicken biryani video, but its adjusted for my family’s liking. For example, I don’t use that much red chile in my mix, since my family does not like spicy food. I use this biryani mix for both chicken and vegetable biryani. To save time, I made a mix of all the spices I need and bottle it up ahead of time,  instead of making the biryani mix the day of. Here are the spices that need to be ground:

• 3 Bay Leaves
• 3 pieces of Star Anise
• 6 Black Pepper Corns
• 1 stick of Cinnamon
• 6 Green Cardamoms
• 4 Cloves
• 2 pieces of Mace
• 1 tsp of lichen/kalpasi
• 1 tsp of shahi jeera

I use the Magic Bullet to grind these spices. Once these spices have been ground, I throw them into a bottle and then add the following spices:

• 1 tbsp Coriander
• 1 tsp Cumin
• 2 tsp Chile powder – Vah Chef puts 2 tbsp of Chile powder, I only put 2 tsp!
• 1 tbsp Salt
• 1/4 tsp Tumeric

Mix up all the spices, and voila, you have biryani mix ready for the next time you want to make a biryani. This is good for one biryani – I usually make 3x the amount to save time.