Peas Pulao

A favorite dish at Indian restaurants, this gluten-free, seasoned dish of rice and peas is also easy to make at home.

Jul 09, 2024

If you are on a gluten-free diet, you may at a lot of rice, as we do in our house. And you’ve probably tried basmati rice, the fragrant long-grain rice from India. I typically cook the brown type, but this dish, peas pulao, works well with white rice or brown.

If you’ve been in an Indian restaurant and seen peas pulao (or matar pulao) on the menu, I hope you have ordered and enjoyed it! I believe I may have first encountered peas pulao while traveling in London many years ago, at a curry shop on Brick Lane—I distinctly remember biting into a cardamom pod in my mouthful of rice!

But peas pulao is also easy to make at home, as it is just rice cooked with browned onions, peas, and a blend of aromatic spices—cinnamon stick, cloves, cumin seeds, and cardamom pods. Those are all spices I keep in my pantry, but if you don’t have them, they are easily available online, such as at The Spice House. The only step that will make this take longer than cooking plain rice is browning the onions.

Here's a tip about browning onions: if you ever see a recipe that tells you to sauté onions until they are golden brown, then estimates the time to be “about 5 minutes” or something similar, do not believe it! I’m sorry to say, but there is no way to brown onions quickly; it’s going to take around 15 minutes to give onions a light golden color. They have to be cooked over medium heat to slowly evaporate the moisture (onions hold a lot of water) and get them to the point where their sugars come forward. Once the browning begins, keep on eye on them, because they can go from brown to burned pretty quickly—another reason to use medium, not high, heat. If you don’t have the patience for that, I get it; simply cook the onions until they become translucent and move to the next step—that should take only 5 minutes.

If you use white rice for this dish, give the rice a rinse and let it soak while you do the next few steps. If you use brown rice, I’d recommend soaking the rice for several hours ahead of time—I often soak brown rice overnight—to give it a head start on cooking. If you don’t soak brown rice, it will likely turn out to be rather firm to the bite.

I’ve been following this recipe for a long time, and it’s never let me down. It is delicious as part of a meal featuring other Indian dishes—try it with chicken vindaloo or this cauliflower recipe—but I’ve also served it alongside simpler dishes, like roast chicken.

Ingredients:

1 cup basmati rice (white or brown; if using brown, soak for several hours beforehand)
1 cup water
1 cup sliced yellow onion
2 tablespoons neutral flavored oil, such as sunflower
½ teaspoon whole cumin seeds
½ stick cinnamon
2 cloves
2 cardamom pods, crushed with the flat side of a knife
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 cup frozen peas

Rinse the rice under water and let it soak in enough water to cover while you do the next steps (if using brown rice, hopefully it’s already been soaking a while!)
Add the oil to a saucepan and warm it on the stove over medium heat
When the oil is hot, add all the spices and stir for several seconds
Add the sliced onions and sauté them until they are golden brown
Strain the rice and add it to the pan with 1 cup of fresh water, the salt, and the peas and stir to combine everything thoroughly
Increase the heat to high and bring the liquid to a boil, then cover the pan and reduce the heat to low
Cook for 25 minutes without removing the cover
Remove the pan from the heat and let it rest for 5 minutes, then uncover, fluff up the rice with a fork, and serve
I used the dull side of the knife to cut a roughly half-inch piece of cinnamon, and it crumbled in pieces, but that’s ok. Other spices are cardamom pods, cumin seeds, cloves, and bay leaf.