I’ve posted a lot of chicken curry recipes over the years. Keep in mind that the name “chicken curry” doesn’t refer to a specific dish but to a genre: chicken cooked with spices in a thick or thin gravy/sauce. Variations in the spices and proportions and ingredients make for results that are subtly or wildly different. And this is home cooking: while there are canonical forms of many dishes (sliced by region, religion, caste, community etc.) in the home cooking repertoire, there are as many, if not more, that arise out of playing with what is at hand (or what catches your eye as you are cooking). Those of you who’ve made a number of my recipes know that this is the genre in which most of my recipes fall and this recipe is no exception. I improvized it when I first made it and it was a big hit at home. And so here it is for you all to try as well. Continue reading →

My go-to roast chicken preparation is Judy Rodgers’ blast furnace method from the almighty Zuni Cafe Cookbook [affiliate link]. There are other roast chickens I like very much—Marcella Hazan’s still-life with two lemons, Samin Nosrat’s buttermilk-brined chicken—but the Zuni Cafe roast chicken reigns supreme in our house: my family would not complain if that was the only one I made for the rest of our days together. But I am an asshole and forever given to tinkering and experimentation and so I cannot resist sneaking in the occasional departure from our family favourite. This is one such recent departure—though the fingerprints of the Zuni Cafe method will be visible to anyone who knows it. I don’t turn the oven up as high as I don’t want the spices to burn—both for the sake of the chicken and for the sake of not filling the kitchen with smoke. I start out at 400º and raise the temperature 425º halfway in. It works very well with the Costco chickens we’ve been cooking of late, yielding a very juicy bird with crisp, spicy skin at just about the 55 minute mark. Your actual oven time will obviously vary depending on your oven and the size of your bird. Continue reading →

This recipe is a variation on one of my absolute favourite chicken dishes. Made by an aunt who is one of the two best cooks in the entire extended family, we refer to it only as “shaada chicken” or “white chicken”. It visually resembles the rezala but unlike that classic Bengali “Mughlai” dish it does not contain nuts or yogurt. In my aunt’s recipe the chicken is cooked with pureed onions, ginger, garlic, green chiliies and a few whole spices and that’s it. (No, there’s no haldi/turmeric in this—I know, it feels strange to me too.) I got that recipe from my aunt several years ago—and it became very popular on an Indian food forum way back when—but of course I could never make it taste as good as she does. As to whether that’s because she left something out of the recipe or because her hand is just several orders of magnitude better than mine, I don’t know. But I do know that this variation that adds a few more “white”/grey spices to the mix is also pretty good. It’s even approved of by our children. Give it a go—there’s a good chance you’ll like it too. Continue reading →

This recipe is an adaptation of an adaptation. I came across a reference last month to a David Lebovitz recipe for roast chicken with shallots. Looking on his site I discovered that his recipe is adapted from a cookbook by Susan Herrmann Loomis. I don’t know the original and am not sure how much or what change the recipe went through in Lebovitz’ adaptation but you will be entirely unsurprised to hear that my adaptation of the adaptation was an answer to the question, “Hmmm looks interesting, now how can I Indianize this?” I started with the tediously obvious swap of ghee for olive oil. I considered thin tamarind paste in place of red wine vinegar but was too lazy to soak a ball of tamarind and extract the paste; and so I went with lime juice. To the pepper in the recipe I added a lot of ground cumin and some ground Kashmiri chilli for colour. And I tore up a bunch of curry leaves and added them to the mix. I fully expected this to get me a lot of side-eye from the family—who would be happy if I made no roast chicken other than Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe blast furnace classic for the rest of my days—but what do you know, it was a big hit and is now in the rotation. Continue reading →

Here at the My Annoying Opinions haveli we eat a lot of chicken curry. To broaden the kids’ horizons past their favourite “red curry chicken“, and to keep things interesting for the missus and myself as well, I am constantly tinkering with spice blends and souring agents. I improvised this version in early July and as the missus deemed it worthy of addition to the rotation, I wrote down what I did. Accordingly, I am able to present it to you as well to try.

I use Kashmiri chillies here for colour, black peppercorns for the heat and Sichuan peppercorn to accentuate the black peppercorn’s bite. Star anise adds a nice brightness as well around the edges. In place of tomatoes or tamarind I use Chinkiang black vinegar as the souring agent (if you don’t have any you can use balsamic or sherry vinegar). Give it a go: you might like it a lot as well. Continue reading →

A couple of times a year a local farmer sells these massive chickens that weigh roughly 8 lbs each and we buy a bunch at a time and freeze ’em. You’d think at this size the birds would be older and the meat tough but that’s not the case at all—must be some kind of large breed grown for meat. I usually separate the breast, take it off the bone and cube it up for chicken tikkas and use the dark meat for a curry. Right before Christmas I defrosted and cut up another one of these birds. But this time I turned them into two curries, one for the boys, one for us. Both started out the same way, more or less, with identical marinades, except added extra-hot chilli powder for this one. Both were marinated for quite a while and cooked in the marinade and the chicken’s own juices. They were finished very differently though and the final dishes were very different. I’ll post the milder recipe sometime next month (probably). Here now is this iteration that ended up resembling a korma even though it doesn’t follow a strict recipe for one. Whatever you call it it’s very tasty. Continue reading →

Chicken cooked with spinach (palak) is a popular dish in Indian restaurants in the US, though as with seemingly almost all dishes in Indian restaurants the sauce is usually heavily laden with cream. This is a heartier home-style preparation that let the flavour of the spinach shine and uses chicken on the bone to develop denser flavour. This is, broadly speaking, a Punjabi recipe, made with both mutton (goat) and chicken, and, frankly, I far prefer it with mutton—perhaps because that’s the version we ate most of the time when I was growing up. I don’t want to suggest that my recipe is a classic Punjabi recipe, however (though it may well be close); my version is a take on my mother’s version—we are Bengalis but as we lived all over India during my childhood my mother’s repertoire included recipes from various regions, hybridized by and hybridizing her Bengali instincts. My major departure from my mother is in using copious amounts of kasoori methi. Kasoori methi refers to dried fenugreek leaves. It can be found easily in any South Asian grocery: crumbled in with the spinach it adds a smoky, umami’ish depth to the dish. Continue reading →