Cooking Pakistani food outside Pakistan

Start with the cooking cue

Cooking Pakistani food away from Pakistan usually comes down to three practical problems: some ingredients aren't sold nearby, the ones that are sold nearby aren't labelled the way you'd expect, and the cuts of meat at a regular supermarket don't match what a recipe assumes you can get. None of these are reasons to change how a dish is cooked — they're reasons to know what to substitute and where to look.

Control heat and moisture

Start with where to shop. A South Asian, Middle Eastern or halal grocer — in person or, increasingly, online — is worth finding before anywhere else, since it's where whole spices, basmati rice, ghee, atta (chapati flour) and fresh green chillies are reliably available and priced sensibly. A regular supermarket can fill in gaps (onions, tomatoes, yogurt, standard cuts of meat), but relying on it alone for spices means paying more for smaller, pre-ground jars that lose aroma faster than whole spice bought from a shop that turns over stock quickly. In the UK, kalonji is often sold as "nigella seeds"; in North America, ajwain sometimes appears as "carom seeds" — same ingredient, different label, worth knowing before you assume a shop doesn't stock it.

Tarka note: Let aroma and texture confirm the clock. Timings vary with pan width and burner strength.

Adjust for your kitchen

Meat cuts are the other real gap. Bone-in shank or shin — what most nihari recipes call for — isn't always at the front counter of a Western supermarket, but butchers will usually cut it on request, and it's worth asking by the cut's other names (beef shank, osso buco cut) if "nihari cut" doesn't register. Bone-in mutton is harder to source outside a halal butcher in much of the US and Western Europe; goat, where available, is a closer substitute than lamb, though lamb will still work with a shorter simmer. For chicken karahi or biryani, bone-in, skin-on thighs and drumstick pieces from any regular supermarket are a reasonable substitute for the whole-chicken pieces a recipe from Pakistan assumes.

A few substitutions come up often enough to note directly: if fresh green chillies aren't available, serrano peppers are the closest match in heat and flavour, more so than jalapeños, which are milder and thicker-walled. If ghee isn't stocked, it can be made at home by simmering unsalted butter until the milk solids separate and brown slightly, then straining — a 20-minute process, not a special ingredient to hunt down. Basmati rice specifically (not just any long-grain rice) matters more than most substitutions on this list; our guide to basmati rice covers why the grain itself, not just the cooking method, is what keeps biryani and pulao from clumping.

None of this changes the actual cooking technique — a karahi is still built by reducing tomatoes until the oil separates, a biryani still finishes on sealed low heat, a nihari still needs hours, not minutes. What changes is sourcing and substitution, and once that's sorted, the recipes on this site work the same in a London flat or a Toronto kitchen as they do at home.