Recipes with crisp fried onions

5 recipes that use crisp fried onions, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Biye barir roast, takes 75 minutes. It is most often cooked with onion, green chillies and cumin.

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Madrouba

Madrouba means 'beaten', and in Doha and across Qatar and Oman it is a Ramadan favourite, cooked in big pots and beaten with a wooden spoon until the rice and chicken become one creamy porridge. It is soft and savoury, warmed by cumin, cardamom and black lime, and finished with a pool of ghee and sometimes crisp fried onion. Families eat it at iftar after dates and soup, or on cold evenings. The mistake is adding all the water at the start and walking away: the rice needs stirring so it breaks down evenly without catching. Chef's tip: use a whisk or a sturdy wooden spoon in the last 15 minutes and beat hard; the texture should be smooth with only tiny threads of chicken.

105 minGulf Arabian Chicken

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Biye barir roast

Ask anyone who grew up in Bangladesh what they look forward to at a biye bari, a wedding house, and the chicken roast is near the top, a single fried leg or breast lounging in a thick, sweet-spiced, ghee-glossed gravy beside a mound of polao. The word roast is a bit of a misnomer: the chicken is fried until golden and then simmered in a gravy of onion paste, yoghurt, milk and a little sugar, perfumed with cardamom, mace and kewra, so it tastes rich rather than charred. Children love it because it is mild and gently sweet, with only whole green chillies for warmth. A common error is skipping the frying, which leaves the chicken pale and lets it fall apart in the sauce. Chef's tip: use bone-in thighs and drumsticks with deep slashes, so the gravy gets into the meat during the short simmer.

75 min

Bangladeshi Chicken

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Suti kabab

Suti means thread, and that is the trick of this Old Dhaka speciality: the beef is scraped and pounded so fine that it would slide off a skewer, so the kebab-maker winds cotton thread around it before it goes over the charcoal. The stalls of Beribadh and Nazimuddin Road grill them through the evening during Ramadan iftar and at weekends, and the result is a long, soft, smoky kebab that almost melts, eaten with paratha, sliced onion and lime. Raw papaya and roasted gram flour hold and tenderise the meat, and fried onions give a sweet depth. Too much lean meat is the most common error, because without some fat the kebab turns dry and crumbly. Chef's tip: wet your hands before shaping and chill the shaped skewers for 20 minutes, so they keep their shape when the thread goes on.

75 min

Bangladeshi Meat

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Koofteh Tabrizi

Koofteh Tabrizi is the pride of Tabriz in Iranian Azerbaijan, a meatball so big that one feeds a person, made for guests and for cold winter evenings in the north-west. Lamb or beef mince is kneaded with rice, yellow split peas and lots of herbs, then wrapped around a hidden heart of hard-boiled egg, prunes, walnuts and barberries and simmered in a tomato-saffron broth. At the table the broth is ladled over bread first, then the koofteh is cut open. A common mistake is under-kneading: the mixture must be worked until sticky, or the ball splits in the pot. Chef's tip: lower the meatballs into broth that is barely trembling, not boiling, and don't touch them for the first 20 minutes while they firm up.

150 min

Persian Meat

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Haleem

Haleem is cooked in vast pots across Pakistan in the month of Muharram and during Ramadan, when neighbours queue with bowls in Karachi, Lahore and Hyderabad. Cracked wheat, barley and several lentils cook for hours with beef until everything is beaten into one thick, stretchy, deeply savoury porridge. Each bowl is finished with crisp fried onions, ginger, green chilli, mint and lemon, so everyone builds their own. It takes time but freezes well, so make a big pot. Chef's tip: beat the haleem hard with a wooden spoon or a hand blender on short pulses; you want long meaty threads, not a smooth purée.

300 min

Pakistani Curries

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Madrouba

Biye barir roast

Suti kabab

Koofteh Tabrizi

Haleem

Goes well with crisp fried onions