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The average Indian guy can't cook worth a damn. In all honesty, they don't need to, any place with a decent concentration of workers, be they blue or white collar, has an abundance of small stalls that serve everything from snacks to passable meals for cheap and cheerful prices. And they can always lean on their wives/mom, or if middle class, a visiting cook, if richer, a live-in one, and "tiffin" services that deliver meals to you at the workplace for lunch or dinner are popular, if you don't want to order from a restaurant.
Not that I don't know guys who can cook, but they range from being able to just about making a passable meal to being decent, and most of them were forced to learn it because they were living in dorms during college and couldn't tolerate the cafeteria slop or afford takeout.
I can't call myself a cook with a straight face, but I do know the absolute basics, and can probably serve something that doesn't cause food poisoning. I do intend to learn, especially if I have to live alone in the West. A median doctor's wage in the UK makes splurging on takeout, as I would prefer, fraught. I can get away with it today because I have no expenses worth the name and a respectable salary by Indian standards, but my girlfriend made it clear that she won't cook for me if I can't make some contribution to the process (well, when we were in the UK I did chop vegetables and made undercooked chicken noodles!), and it is entirely possible that due to the vagaries of mandatory rotational training we might not even be able to live together. Shame, because she's a great chef, though her attempts at biryani come out weird (still tasty, just not biryani), and the one time she made vegan biryani* for my vegan cousin and his British girlfriend, it literally brought her to tears from the spice, though she gobbled it down like a champ.
Well, I don't have particularly high standards, I'm happy with making myself spaghetti, bacon, steaks and so on indefinitely. Worst case I'll subsist off frozen pizza.
*An absolute abomination of a concept. If you think pineapple and sardines on pizza is abhorrent, you can't imagine my distaste for that travesty. It's worse than the South Indian predilection to put coconut in it.
As a man who has made biryani at home, I can't recommend an instant pot enough if you ever try it. It really helps.
Do you have a particular recipe to recommend? I have an Instant Pot and do appreciate a good biryani.
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I am already sold on rice cookers, and ovens. For some reason the latter is a rarity in India, and after experiencing their charms in the UK, I want one desperately.
And probably an air fryer too, while I'm at it.
What kind of biryani did you make?
Dude it blows my mind that they don't have ovens in India. I used to work with an Indian dude who one time revealed he only ever kept pots in his, and was like "well we don't have them back home either so I don't really have a use for one". I use my oven so often I could not conceive of not having one in my home.
I made chicken biryani, using this recipe (@VoxelVexillologist, here you go). I did use white meat instead of dark cause I prefer white meat, but otherwise I thought the recipe was really good.
That recipe has my seal of approval, it looks like biryani, and probably tasted pretty good. Unlike some claims in the West about what biryani can be, which left me comatose haha.
Easy mistake for outsiders to make. The whole country is the oven.
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