Disclaimer!! You must have A LOT of patience to make this dish (and be in a good mood).
My husband LOVES haleem and orders it quite often, but given the limited dinner options due to #covid19, we aren’t ordering much from outside and neither are we visiting our favorite Pakistani restaurants for some delicious food. Thus, I took on this challenge of making #haleem as a surprise for him yesterday.
Haleem is a thick stew made from wheat, meat and various lentils. It tastes fantastic with hot naans (we like the garlic ones), in fact any Indian bread. While reading up about the cultural history of the dish, I discovered an interesting fact that I didn’t know about earlier— In India, haleem prepared in Hyderabad, during the Ramadan month, is transported all over the world through a special courier service. (Source: Wikipedia). I love learning about these little hidden details behind the dishes I choose to cook.
If you live in Singapore and don’t have the patience to go through the process of making this, then you must try ordering haleem from Bismillah - they have the best haleem I’ve ever tried!
After nearly 3 hours of stressful cooking, I was extremely thrilled with the outcome, so I guess it was ultimately worth the effort! No one in my family makes haleem, so I had to depend on multiple recipes and I finally mixed and matched based on the ingredients I had at home and put together a version which made us very content.
I’m sharing the stuff I used below, and I hope you give it a try. It's not easy, but super tasty and the sheer joy of accomplishing this dish is makes it worth it :)
Ingredients:
400 gms mutton (goat meat)
2 large onions (1 for the cooking and 1 at the end for the garnishing)
1 tbsp ginger/ garlic paste
Masalas-
1.5 tsp turmeric (1/2 for the curry and 1 for the lentils)
1.5 tsp garam masala (1/2 for the meat and 1 for the lentils)
2 tsp red chili powder
2 tsp coriander powder
2 tbsp chaat masala
Dal (lentils- take equal proportions of the lentils you have at home)-
2 tbsp chana dal
2 tbsp tur dal
2 tbsp urad dal
2 tbsp masoor dal
130-150 gms wheat (soak it for a few hours)
3 tbsp basmati rice
1 cinnamon stick
Salt taste
Recipe for homemade haleem:
Step 1: Clean the mutton properly.
Step 2: Heat oil in a pressure cooker.
Step 3: Add onions,ginger/garlic paste, green chilies- Ensure the onions turn dark brown, then add the powdered spices, mutton pieces, salt to taste and fry for about 3-4 minutes.
Step 4: Add water and cook till the mutton is extremely tender (this took me a long time).
Step 5: Check if the mutton is super soft--so soft that it falls apart. Once you feel it's soft enough, then blend it in a blender and keep it aside. Keep the gravy of the mutton separate.
Step 6: Since I had only one pressure cooker at home, I had to wait till the meat was cooked to start my dal. If you have two cookers, you can do this at the same time to save an entire hour! Add wheat, rice and the different dals together with turmeric, cinnamon, and salt to taste to the cooker, and cook it till the dal is extremely soft and mushy (like khichdi aka pish-pash).
Step 7: Once the dal is done, mix the dal, mutton and the gravy together and add a little garam masala to the mixture. Keep stirring to remove any lumps and mix well. This part is a little tiring to be honest, but you must do it well to avoid the lumpy texture of the congealed dal
Step 8: Deep fry some onions for the garnishing step.
P.S- I never use ghee, but you can add some to your dish.
Plate up!!
Serve hot with cut green chilies, deep fried onions, coriander leaves, chaat masala and a splash of lemon.
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