Hyderabadi Haleemحلیم
⏱ Prep 30m🍳 Cook 75m🍽 Serves 6🌿 Non-veg
Video: Cook With Fem (YouTube)
Haleem is the rich, slow-cooked Ramzan porridge of Hyderabad — meat, wheat, lentils and spices pounded for hours into a smooth, ghee-glossed paste, finished with fried onions, mint, lemon and fried cashews. Deeply savoury and restorative.
📍 Make it in Plano
This recipe is the same everywhere — but where you buy the ingredients and eat the dish is local to you.
Finding Desi spots near Plano…
Ingredients
- ▪Mutton, boneless500 g
- ▪Broken wheat (dalia)1 cup
- ▪Mixed lentils (chana, masoor, moong)1/2 cup
- ▪Fried onions1 cup
- ▪Ginger-garlic paste2 tbsp
- ▪Yogurt1/2 cup
- ▪Red chilli powder1 tbsp
- ▪Garam masala & turmeric1 tsp each
- ▪Mint leaves1/2 cup
- ▪Ghee4 tbsp
- ▪Cashews & lemon, to garnishas needed
🌍 Cooking abroad? Substitutions
- Traditional haleem is pounded for hours; a hand blender gets you there in minutes at home.
- Broken wheat (dalia) and the lentils are in every Indian store; barley can stand in for part of the wheat.
- Keep it moving on low heat at the end — it thickens fast and can catch.
Method
- 1Soak the wheat and lentils together for 1–2 hours.
- 2Cook the mutton with ginger-garlic paste, yogurt, chilli powder, turmeric, half the fried onions, salt and water until very tender; shred it finely.
- 3Cook the soaked wheat and lentils in plenty of water until completely soft and mushy.
- 4Combine the shredded meat, cooked wheat-lentils and garam masala; blend or mash-and-pound with a hand blender to a smooth, thick, uniform paste, adding hot water as needed. Simmer on low, stirring, for 20–30 minutes with ghee until glossy.
- 5Serve hot topped with fried onions, fried cashews, chopped mint, a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of ghee.
A Desi.Net original recipe · part of our Indian Cuisine library. Confirm details and adjust to taste.