Grind all the spices for mutton together into a coarse powder.

Grind the garlic and ginger to a paste, and then press or strain out the extract.

Dissolve the generous teaspoon of saffron strands in the warm milk, adding the turmeric powder for deepening the color.

Fry half the sliced onions till they are a lovely golden brown in about 1 tablespoons of ghee or olive oil.

To prepare the mutton/lamb

In 2 tablespoons ghee or olive oil, fry half the sliced onions to a nice golden color. Add the mutton pieces and the mutton spices you ground in step #1 above, the ginger-garlic extract and the powdered saffron, and fry until the mutton is slightly browned. Add the yoghurt, the chilly powder and salt to taste, and cook until the sauce has thickened a little.

Add hot water and continue cooking until the mutton has cooked through. Add a little more water as necessary to prevent the meat from drying up or the sauce from burning. The final sauce should be thick enough to flow slowly.

To prepare the rice

In 1.5 tbsp of ghee or oliveoil, fry the rice till it becomes opaque. NOTE: Do not wash the rice first. Tie all the spices listed above for flavoring the rice into the muslin cloth, leaving out only the bay leaves. Immerse this in a large pot with about 12 cups of water and bring to the boil. Add the rice and let it cook till it is a little more than half cooked. This will be roughly when the rice has swollen up enough to be visible near the surface of the water.

Remove at once and drain, and then spread out on several large plates to cool.

Dribble the saffron-colored milk over roughly half the rice on the plates, and use a spoon to mix them a little, until the are lightly colored, and the saffron strands randomly dispersed. Do not worry, if water and milk from the process remain on the plate.

To prepare the biriyani

Using your hands, spread ghee or olive oil along the sides and bottom of a large casserole. In this layer the rice and the cooked mutton in alternating layers. Be sure to combine the colored rice with the white. Pourany residual liquids (milk, water) into the casserole. The bottom and top layers should both be rice.

Add the onions fried golden in step #4, and also sprinkle vetiver water generously over the rice. Make sure at least 4-5 strands of saffron are visible.

Place the lid on the casserole and seal the edges tight with the dough as shown in the picture above. Ensure that the dough overlaps with equal thickness both above and below the lid so that no steam can escape. Place a heavy utensil such as a pestle on top of the lid.

Cook on low heat for about 10 minutes on a hot plate, until the dough is dry and warm to touch and a little steam is escaping the sides. Do not unseal this until just before serving. I prefer not to transfer the biriyani into more elegant dishes so that the layers remain undisturbed.

TO PREPARE THE BURHANI RAITA:Peel the garlic cloves, and pound them to shreds in a pestle. Transfer to a bowl, and mix the yoghurt, cumin powder, chilly powder, black salt and plain salt. Blend together using the tines of a fork.