Tandoori Chicken — Grilled or Broiled

a lot of classic takeout foods are really ill suited to the home kitchen but Indian American restaurant style tandoori chicken is not one of them it's so easy so good and you can do it out on the grill or inside under the broiler i'ma show you both ways first thing to consider is your spice mixture your masala in Hindi you could absolutely buy a premade gara masala mixture and then combine it with the key ingredient which is Kashmir chili powder Kashmir chilies give you this beautiful red color without overwhelming you with heat I got that at my local Indo Pak grocery if there's one in Macon Georgia there's probably one in your town if you can't get this you could swap in a combination of cayenne pepper for heat and paprika for color but um use the real stuff and rather than using prepackaged garam masala I am going to toast and grind whole spices not only does that really taste better but in a way it's more convenient because I don't make Indian food every day and whole spices basically last forever if I buy a pre ground masala it's gonna taste like sawdust by the time I use it again so into a pan i'ma throw a tablespoon of cumin seeds and a tablespoon of coriander seeds that's the foundation and a few black peppercorns you can just grind in some black pepper that'd be fine four black cardamom pods you could use green ones but the black ones are stronger a teaspoon of fenugreek seeds you could totally skip that maybe half a cinnamon stick scissors are probably the easiest way to break that in half and that's all and now I'm gonna toast those on medium-high heat if you're thinking what is this some white guy doing a dumb down version of North Indian cuisine let me tell you much respect but that is exactly what is happening right here and I think it could be even dumber I think that you can get away with just the three C's cumin coriander and cardamom to a palate like mine I think that's enough to make something taste like Indian food a lot of Indian cooks toast the spices one by one so that each can get the specific time that it needs but that is not a thing that I am going to do when they smell really fragrant and I can see some tiny wisps of smoke coming off them I'll take them off the heat and dump them into the coffee grinder that I use for spices give them a good blast you'll probably need to reach in there and dislodge some of the big pieces that aren't getting ground up this is why these things are built to only spin when the lid is on and there you go I say a simplified homemade masala is better a more elaborate store-bought one speaking of simple I think it makes your life a lot easier to just do this with one cut of chicken today I'm using legs only legs I think dark meat tastes way better and it's much more forgiving you can't overcook it it just gets better in my opinion five bucks for all of these and I don't have to do any home butchery well the one thing that I will do is score them a few deep cuts down to the bone that'll help them cook way faster and you'll get more delicious surface area you could absolutely use a mixture of different chicken parts if you want but this way they're all going to be done at basically the same time that is my biggest stainless steel bowl they're going into don't use anything that will react with acid like non anodized aluminum most people would mix the spices and the marinade up into a paste and then put that paste onto the chicken but with these kinds of things I much prefer to just put the ingredients directly on the meat one by one salt first and this way I don't have to rely on somebody else's math I can just use my eyes to judge how much salt these need then the masala same deal just eyeballing it looking for a heavy dusting everywhere but not too much you go overboard and you'll get a noticeably powdery pasty texture on the finished product I'll save the rest of my spices there for something here's that gorgeous Kashmir eat chili powder again just eyeballing it that's enough to result in mild to moderate heat for Western tongues at least now one cheat I always do when I'm gonna make a lot of Indian food is bottled ginger garlic paste from the indo-pak peel and grate your own ginger and garlic if you want but this just saves so much effort and I cannot taste the difference in a heavily cooked dish like this just a couple of spoonfuls again too much could give you a gross texture I'm just gonna do the juice of one lemon some people might do more lemon proportionally but an acid this strong will chemically cook your meat if given enough time which makes for this horrible mushy texture I don't want to have to cook this in two hours precisely or whatever I want to throw this in the fridge and be able to cook it whenever I want to in the next 24 hours or so we're gonna squeeze lemon over it in the end anyway lastly yogurt full fat Greek yogurt is probably the closest thing I can get to the curd that Indian cooks would use it's nice and thick not too wet and legit I'm only using half a cup for like five pounds of meat and bone here if you use more than that you're just gonna waste it because you have to knock off the excess before you cook it I prefer to simply have no excess at all just a thick paste all around now you can see the color in there after cooking that would be kind of a pale rusty orange if you want that candy apple red tandoori chicken you know what you got to do am I gonna do it do it I'm totally gonna do it this is absolutely what they're doing down at your favorite strip mall Indian American joints I have no regrets cover up that bowl yes I've ordered some silicone Bowl covers and honestly you could cook that right away but the flavor does get a little more intense if you let it sit for a few hours I wouldn't marinate it for more than a day it'll get kind of mushy yes a tandoor is a clay oven not a grill but a charcoal grill really is the best substitute it gets you that same intense heat in that same smoky flavor a few paper towels for kindling go on to the bottom grate spray them with some grease to turn them into an oil wick chimney starter goes on top light the towels on fire and then filler all the way up with natural chunk charcoal it burns hotter than briquettes wait 10 minutes until it becomes a glowing Tower of Doom and dump er out then put on a pretty heavy layer of fresh charcoal on top we need to start with a lot of fuel upfront to get this chicken cooked all the way through top grate goes on I'll wait five minutes for the new charcoal to ignite and for the heat to burn off the sludge from my previous grilling clean that off with the wire brush then I may use the Chef John grill greasing technique pull it off with tongs and spray it if you did this over the fire you'd get some scary pyrotechnics chicken goes on and there's no excess to painstakingly scrape off lest it drip onto the coals and cause a flare-up as soon as you get it all down cover them up my bottom vents are wide open giving plenty of air to the coals my top vents are half closed I think that gets you the perfect amount of airflow and therefore heat wide-open would be too hot you keep this covered to keep the heat from getting out of hand and also to bake the inside of the chicken not just blast the outside although after five minutes side one is pretty blasted I'm no grill master my fires are always a little uneven so I'll juggle around some pieces if this stage if some seem to be getting way more heat than others get every piece flipped and then I just cover it up and forget about it that's it side two will get nice and charred over the next few minutes and as the coals naturally die down the heat will reduce and these can slow-cook in there I go inside and prep my vegetables I want whole rings of onions so I've got to peel this white onion whole easier if you just sacrifice the outer most edible layer I'll cut it up into big thick slices and just push the rings out a big green bell pepper I want rings to match so I'll cut off the top reach in and dig out the seeds and then layer on our side and cut big rings that's enough veg for two or three people easy I wonder how our chicken is doing it's been 20 minutes since we flipped and covered it so let's go down and look looking beautiful again I might move some pieces around if they seem to be getting more heat than others some people might baste these with some ghee or something at this point but dark meat is fatty it's basically self-basting you might wonder if this is still even cooking but look plenty of smoke coming out of that grill nice slow cooking if we were cooking white meat we need to be really careful about not drying it out but dark meat almost never dries out it just goes soft and sticky and delicious it's bulletproof as the professional cooks say I gave it 15 more minutes so that's maybe 40 minutes of total cooking time since you scored them you can basically see they're done just by looking at them I see clean bone clear juices but you can take their temperature the deepest part of this one leg that's way bigger than the others is reading 170 Fahrenheit which I would consider the minimum you want to hit with dark meat which means the rest of these are probably awesome I'm just pulling them out onto a tray and hey worst-case scenario if your fire dies too quickly is you just throw this tray in the oven to let your chicken finish up inside we go and yeah ideally we'd grill our vegetables but our fire isn't nearly hot enough at this point and I don't feel like building another one so pan goes onto my biggest burner set all the way on high heat this is a great job for a cast iron pan when it's really hot a little neutral oil goes in it should be smoking and real quick put in your veg little salt then don't move it for a second that's how you'll get some nice Brown edges while keeping the interior of the pieces is virtually raw see just one or two little tosses and I really want this to stay crispy so I'll take them out before they seem done they'll soften some more as they sit alrighty bej on a plate chicken on the veg and a wedge of lemon squeeze plenty of that over and holy crap that is amazing so many times when you try to recreate restaurant classics at home you are disappointed but that does not taste like a passable substitution that tastes like the real thing and it is way easy to make I see no reason to make rice or naan or roti with it that is a totally satisfying protein and veg meal the likes of which many of us should be eating more frequently okay say you live in an apartment and you don't have a grill or what Brits would call a barbecue you can totally do this under the broiler what Ritz would call a grill you just need a sheet pan with a rack I'm demonstrating with a half batch but I obviously have room for more there it goes very top shelf right under the broiler as hot as I can get it 10 minutes later it looks like this great char flip them around and do the second side you really do almost get that intense tandoor level of heat if you can get the chicken right next to the element another 10 minutes later everything is brown I'll turn the broiler off and just set the oven to bake 350 Fahrenheit anything moderate as you can see the chicken was basically cooked at this point but I really prefer to quote-unquote overcook dark meat to get it soft and sticky so back and it goes to bake in the middle rack oh and if the stuff dripping into the tray is burning and threatening to set off your smoke detector you can just pour a little water in there under the rack I picked that low and slow for fifteen more minutes and out it comes those are great it's actually easier to control the heat in the oven so the color is even prettier the only thing they lack is the smoky flavor you get from a grill or a charcoal fueled tandoor there is I'm told a popular Indian technique that involves igniting a single coal on your stove top and then putting it into a dish full of ghee to fill your oven with smoke but I'm pretty sure my lawyer would advised me to not advocate that okay back over here to my grilled batch you might be wondering why did he make 5 pounds of chicken legs is he feeding an army no I just think that when you make tandoori chicken you might as well make a lot of extra so that later you can make Britain's national dish a great classic from the great city of Glasgow which we shall prepare half a fortnight hence

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,436,022

Rating: 4.9326801 out of 5

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Id: GcWYXQ5vILs

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CheeseBadger]

This one looks delicious.