India At-A-Glance

The next stop on our journey takes us to India, where curries, tikkas, koftas and saagwallas reign supreme. India's cuisine is fragrant and heavily-spiced, usually served with rice, and naan, a flat bread that is great for sopping up all the delicious sauces. In the North of India, dishes are very meat-based, while in the South of India, dishes are predominantly vegetarian, and spicy-hot!

from Flickr - by jasmine8559

I chose to make a very traditional tandoori chicken, served with jasmine rice and garlic naan. Now, there needs to be a bit of a disclaimer here, because I don't have a tandoor oven, and I also didn't use the red food coloring that the recipe called for, which would have turned the chicken the bright red that it's known for being. Honestly, until this recipe, I didn't know that the red was caused by food coloring, I just thought that it was the combination of spices that caused the brightness of the color...but I was wrong. Food coloring doesn't have any flavor, so I decided to leave it out of the recipe...artificial colors aren't really necessary to my diet.

The process for this dish is pretty intensive, but I didn't take pictures along the way. Sorry guys! I brushed 6 chicken thighs with lemon juice, and marinated them for 30 minutes. Once the 30 minutes had passed, the chicken thighs got covered with a yogurt mixture, including ginger, garlic, onion, lemon juice, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, paprika, salt and chilli powder. I could have marinated it for 4 hours before cooking, but overnight tends to work better for me, so that's what I did. The next day, I cooked the chicken on a wire rack over a baking sheet for 20 minutes, in a 350 degree oven. If the thighs are bone-in, I would double the time that they cook. Those cooked while I made some jasmine rice. There's this great naan that you can get in the frozen section of the grocery store, by Tandoor Chef. All you have to do is throw it in a 400 degree oven for 2 minutes and it's ready to go...and it's delicious! I think I probably should have removed the yogurt sauce from the chicken before cooking, but the dish was tasty. I'm not sure I'd make it again...but it was enjoyable for what it was. It definitely didn't compare to Tandoori chicken that I've had in the past...so I continue the search for a better recipe! I'll keep trying 'til I find it!