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This is a very famous dish that is eaten by meat lovers across India. Most Indian cooking is eyeballed ingredients and bunging stuff into more stuff. It has a sense of movement and power, you are always hearing things sizzle, and splash in the kitchen. The fragrance of the various spices invigorate and help develop an appetite.
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Ingredients (mostly eyeballed to fit some sort of metric)
1 whole chicken skinned, Cleaned and Quartered 1 cup hung curd (yoghurt) 1 tablespoon red chilli powder 1 teaspoon turmeric powder ½ teaspoon Asafoetida(hing) 1 ½ teaspoon of ginger-garlic paste(I'll tell you the recipe below) Juice of ½ a lime Salt to taste
For Ginger-Garlic paste (make this paste and keep in a jar in the fridge, it is used in a lot of Indian preparations.)
½ cup of chopped garlic cloves ½ cup of chopped ginger 4- fresh dark green chillies
Just bung this into a blender with some water, and blend into a fine paste. (Pro Tip: cut the ginger root against the grain to ensure your paste doesn't end up with ginger 'hair' fibres)
Procedure
Prep the chicken for marination, either use a fork to poke holes or a knife to slice some gashes into the meatiest parts of the chicken(breasts, and thighs). This will help the marination seep into the meat, and help flavour it from the inside out.
Bung the following ingredients into a bowl and mix- curd, red chilli powder, turmeric powder, asafoetida(hing), ginger garlic paste, lime juice and salt. This is your marinade, add the chicken and massage the marinade into the gashes and make sure you cover the entire chicken.
This needs to marinate for at least 6-8 hours or overnight if possible.
After marination, you can cook it one of two ways, you can either bake/ roast it in the oven. I usually bung it in at 200 C for 35-40 mins, and then check if cooked and tender. Or you can go the traditional route and grill it over a wood or coal fire. The secret is that one the meat starts to dry out during cooking, you have to baste the chicken with some vegetable oil and lime juice. It helps the meat remain moist.
Once cooked you can serve this with a simple salad of red onions, sliced cabbage with some salt and lime juice. Or you can also serve it with a chutney made by blending, 1 part mint leaves, three-part coriander leaves, a teaspoon of cumin seeds, two green chillies, some lime juice and salt to taste.
