Recipe question

I found a recipe for Braised Napa Cabbage Biryani on Food52. Like all biryanis it's composed of alternating layers of basmati rice and a spiced filling, in this case based on napa cabbage. This is a Parsi recipe. It looks pretty good, except for one aspect of the filling. These are the filling ingredients listed in the recipe:

1 medium napa cabbage, chopped
1 cup tomato paste
2 large onions, diced
1/4 cup olive oil
4 tablespoon ground turmeric
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 tablespoon saffron tea (optional)
2-3 teaspoon pink salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper

One cup of tomato paste?? That seems like an awful lot. I'm wondering if they meant tomato sauce.

Your thoughts?

-Paul W.

To how much rice? A nappa cabbage, even a medium one can be pretty big. It's not clearly wrong but that does seem like a very large amount.

2 cups raw basmati rice.

-Paul W.

So six cups cooked? Yeah, that seems like way, way too much tomato paste. I've never made biryani, for what it's worth.

[Jenise]

Or 1 tblsp tom paste. Even a cup of sauce seems like overkill. Do the directions not provide a clue?

You start by sauteeing the onion in olive oil until caramelized. Then add the tomato paste, cabbage, and spices and cook 15-20 minutes on low heat. Meanwhile you cook the rice most of the way, until al dente. Then you assemble the biryani: put 2 TBS olive oil on the bottom of the pot, a layer of rice over that, then a layer of the cabbage mixture, then alternating layers of rice and mixture for a total of six layers.

Then you cover the pot and allow it to steam over low heat for about an hour, until the rice on top is tender and fully cooked and the liquid is almost entirely absorbed. This is standard operating procedure for biryanis, and it's also the technique used in making jambalaya (although for a jambalaya the process only takes 1/2 hour or so). A cup of tomato sauce would make sense here--it would provide the moisture to finish cooking the rice. A cup of tomato paste doesn't look at all right to me.

-Paul W.

Unless you're cooking for a really large number of people, I can't imagine a cup of tomato paste going into much of anything. A cup of sauce sounds reasonable, given that you need some moisture to finish the rice.

Now that y'all mention it, a cup of sauce is closer to what you'd use for arroz mexicana, so yes, even less than that.