Recipes – № 38
Grilled Tandoori-Style Chicken
More than most meats or poultry, chicken has a relatively mild flavor, which makes it an ideal canvas for bold flavors. The chicken in this recipe is marinated in heaps of yogurt, lime juice, turmeric, ginger, garlic and cumin. On the grill, these ingredients combine with smoke to produce an unusually savory, aromatic and juicy chicken.
A tandoor is a clay oven, traditionally fired with wood or charcoal. It’s not a practical option for home use (definitely not in most Manhattan apartments!), but if you’re lucky enough to have a grill, especially a charcoal grill, you can use the grill’s smoke and high heat to approximate tandoori chicken.
If you’ve had tandoori chicken at Indian restaurants, you’ve probably been conditioned to expect chicken colored a bright red. Unfortunately, and unappetizingly, this color is not from any spices but from artificial food color (coloring the chicken with red chili would render it inedible to most Western palates). In the absence of food dyes, the grilled chicken has a more muted yellow color from the turmeric, or, depending on how much red chili you use, a muted orange color. Either way it looks delicious. Just don’t expect lipstick-colored miracles.
Serves 4-6
1 whole chicken, approximately 4 lbs
1 quart plain yogurt
3 inches of fresh turmeric root or 1 heaping tsp dried ground turmeric
1 inch fresh ginger root
4 garlic cloves
1 cup lime juice or lemon juice (from about 7 juicy limes or 4 lemons)
1 heaping Tbsp ground cumin
2 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1 cup olive oil
5 Tbsp fine sea salt or Diamond Kosher Salt
2 Ziploc gallon freezer bags
Peel the turmeric root (unless very fresh with soft skin) and peel the ginger root and garlic cloves. Place turmeric, ginger and garlic in a blender along with the salt and lime juice and puree finely. (If you don’t have a blender, use a food processor or just chop everything finely with a knife). Transfer mixture to a bowl and mix with yogurt, cumin, cayenne and olive oil.
Cut the chicken into 8 similarly sized, bone-in pieces. It’s not terribly important how you do that, but I would cut the chicken in half lengthwise, cutting along the spine and between the breasts. Then cut the thighs from the breasts and separate the drumsticks from the thighs. Finally, cut the breast pieces in half across the breast, closer to the wing to yield two similarly sized pieces each. If you have poultry shears, they come in handy for this job.
Place half the chicken pieces in each Ziploc bag along with half the marinade. Squeeze out most of the air from the bags and seal. Marinate in the fridge for 2-3 hours, taking care that all the chicken pieces are submerged in marinade.
1 hour before grilling, remove the chicken pieces from the marinade and bring to room temperature. (You can freeze the leftover marinade to use for one more chicken). If you’re using a charcoal grill, light it 30 minutes prior to grilling the chicken. Grill the chicken, around 10 to 15 minutes per side over medium heat. Chicken takes a relatively long time to cook, so it’s best to avoid the hottest part of the grill to avoid burning the chicken before it’s cooked through, especially in the beginning when the coals are at their hottest. Remove the chicken as soon as it’s cooked to avoid drying it out. Cooked chicken meat feels firm to the touch, but if you’re unsure, you could cut open the thickest part of one of your larger chicken pieces to see if all the chicken has turned opaque. Rest the chicken for 5 minutes, covered loosely with foil. Serve.
Recipe adapted from healwithfood.org.
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