Indian Tandoori Chicken

Wife and husband, Sudha Chalichamu and Venu Chaganti, showed me how easy it is to make tandoori chicken: just marinate chicken, then bake or grill. It's the spice mixtures that go into the marinade that add the mystery. Click at right for the story, Sudha's recipes and how-to photos.

Photo: Danielle Peterson

The Recipe - Indian Tandoori Chicken

As Sudha Chalichamu from Hyderabad, India, taught Lindsay Sterling in South Portland, ME, October, 2012

12 raw chicken drumsticks
1/4 tsp turmeric
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp coriander powder
2 pinch powdered red food coloring (Preema, 999, or Shwad brands), available at Indian stores
3 tsp lemon juice
3 1/2 Tbsp plain yogurt*
3 tsp oil
2 Tbsp ginger-garlic paste, available at Indian stores
1 tsp garam masala**
1 1/2 tsp chili powder
3 Tbsp tandoori masala powder, available at Indian stores
spray oil
1 lime
1 yellow onion
Chunky Chat spice blend, available at Indian stores

Mix all spices with yogurt, oil and lemon juice into a paste. Take skins off chicken. Wash meat and pat dry with paper towel so the marinade sticks. Cut deep slits in the meat down to the bone, without cutting chunks of meat entirely off. Massage paste into chicken, stuffing the paste into the slits. Wash hands and any equipment that touched raw chicken. Cover and let marinate covered in fridge for 3 to 12 hours.

Preheat oven to 425. Line two sheet pans with tinfoil, spray each with oil so the chicken doesn't stick. Lay out the chicken with space in between each drum stick. Cook 20 minutes. Flip chicken pieces, spray the tops with oil, and cook another 20 minutes, or until chicken is cooked throughout.

While the chicken is cooking, make sixteen 3"x3" squares of tinfoil, slice lime into halved wedges, and yellow onion into 1/4 inch thick circles.

When chicken is done, wrap the bone-ends of the drumsticks with tinfoil. This makes festive looking handles which make for neat, hand-held appetizer-eating. Guests squeeze the lime over the chicken and have bites of raw onion between bites of chicken. Diners sprinkle Chunky chat spice blend at the table as they wish.

*Home-made yogurt

1/4 cup unsweetened plain yogurt
3 cups whole milk

Bring whole milk to a boil and turn off heat. Let sit until the milk temperature feels hot but not burning on your pinky. Add yogurt. Cover loosely and leave on the counter overnight. In the morning, you will have yogurt! Refrigerate, and eat as you like. Use a little of this yogurt for making the next batch.

The saying about making yogurt goes: milk sleep night, morning tight.

**Sudha's Homemade Garam Masala

1 Tbsp cumin seed
2 Tbsp ground cinnamon
2 Tbsp whole cloves
1/2 tsp salt

Blend in spice grinder or coffee grinder. Store in spice jar for continual use.



WHERE TO BUY INGREDIENTS

Sudha and her Indian friends often buy for each other when one of them goes to an Indian market in Boston or New York. The spices, she says, are freshest there, which makes sense because of the high volume of shoppers. Here are three stores to try. Find the nearest Indian market by state here. Or try ordering ingredients online.

Subzi Mandi
1518 Oak Tree Rd. #B
Iselin, NJ
732-603-0588

Masala Mahal
798 Main Street
South Portland, ME
207-699-5555

Waltham India Grocery
337 Moody St. 
Waltham, MA
781-899-6016

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2012

See How to Do It

Thank you Danielle Peterson Photography for these wonderful photos. 

She put the ingredients we would need for the marinade out so I could see them: plain yogurt (left), garam masala, coriander powder (front, center) tandoori masala powder (the orange one on the left in back), ginger-garlic paste (yellow, back-middle), oil, lemon juice, turmeric, salt,  chili powder (red, center). These were not the amounts used.

Glamourous shot of the chili powder, center. To the upper left of the chili powder is her Sudha's own homemade ginger-garlic paste (a blending ginger, garlic, turmeric and a little salt) that she made with  her fabulous Mixi Indian blender.  I've never seen them here. When I start my blender import business I'll let you know. :) You can buy the ginger-garlic paste in a jar when you go to the Indian market. I'll try making it in my regular blender and Cuisinart and get back to you.

Mixing the marinade

Massage the marinade into the skin-less chicken with your hands. They insist there is no other way.

Cook in the oven. Nice trick lining the pans with tinfoil and spraying with cooking oil for no-stick and easy clean-up.

When they're done, cut up squares of tinfoil to wrap around the drumstick ends.

Making fruit salad soup with mango pulp and milk - delicious!

Serve with lime wedges and raw onion rounds. You will like raw onion with tandoori chicken!

To be taught tandoori chicken is such a gift. Thank you Venu and Sudha!

Photos: Danielle Peterson 

The Story

A Wing-Lover’s Fantasy

            Now imagine the wing is a drumstick.

By Lindsay Sterling

I left Sudha Chalichamu and Venu Chaganti’s house in Scarborough carrying a glass Pyrex bowl filled with marinating tandoori chicken drumsticks. “They’re like Indian wings!” I thought, recalling the super spicy, hand held chicken appetizers the Indian couple had just introduced me to, “Only they’re drumsticks.” The orange paste that Sudha had made out of homemade Indian yogurt and spices was now getting to work on this next batch of meat. Fresh garlic and ginger would add tang and thrust. Ground coriander, a sweet lift. Lemon juice, tenderness. Cinnamon and clove would add an undetectable mystery. Cumin would comfort like a well-lit campfire. Cardamom would be like the fresh, cool, night air. And then the ground, dried hot chili peppers would put on a massive fireworks show.

            The next day after the chicken had marinated, I did what Sudha had shown me.  I lined two sheet pans with tinfoil, sprayed them with cooking spray, and then placed the goopy drumsticks without touching each other on the foiled pans. They cooked at 425 degrees for about forty minutes. I flipped them once and sprayed them with oil about half way through. In Hyderabad, India, where Sudha and Venu are from, the chicken isn’t cooked in an oven like we have here, but a barrel-sized clay oven called a tandoor, the dish’s namesake. The marinated chicken is skewered on iron rods and roasted in there at super high temperatures created from wood fires or gas. As Sudha slid her pans into her American range, she said, “We use the oven here.” Venu chimed in, “You can grill it, too.”

            Sudha’s husband, Venu, was the one who taught her how to make tandoori chicken. He figured out how to make it when he was a bachelor getting his masters degree in computer programming. At the time, he and Sudha were classmates competing for who was going to be valedictorian. They fell in love and got married, working through the family drama of not having an arranged marriage. After living and working in London, they both found programming jobs in greater Portland. When Sudha was growing up, her mother had discouraged her from cooking, telling her to focus on her studies, but after she got married and Venu taught her how to cook, she loved it and now does most of the cooking for the family even though they both work full time.

            My American guests were arriving to try tandoori chicken. I was subjecting small children to this taste test because the more spicy-food-loving family friends I can cultivate, the more spicy food I get. Plus Venu and Sudha said their daughter started liking spicy food when she was just three years old. Venu said he liked the amount of spice to bring him “to the verge of pain.” Sudha nodded in agreement. I instructed my fellow Americans, “Okay, now squeeze fresh lime over your drumstick. The sourness tones down the spiciness.” One first grader, a little daredevil who’d just jumped into the fifty-degree ocean, took a bite totally nonplussed. (Does she even know what spicy means?) After six seconds, her eyes opened wide, and her mouth opened as if to scream, and she said, “Ahhh! It’s spicy!” I got her some milk. But guess what: she kept eating. We’ll have her over again. The 4^th and 5^th graders ate most of theirs. And the grown ups discovered a lesser-known slice of heaven that’s curiously hot as hell.

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2012