Tag Archives: Indian

Chicken Biryani

12 Jan

This is my new favorite chicken dish.  In fact, it is my new favorite dish, period.  I am not being hyperbolic in the least.  In fact, when I took a bite of this dish, the very first words that ran through my head were, “Holy —-, this is the best chicken I have ever eaten.”  (Edited for posterity.)

Which is odd, really, because to be quite honest, the chicken is not what makes this dish.  Sure, the chicken is cooked nicely, nestled amongst a cushion of basmati rice, softened onions, and fresh cilantro, but it’s the flavors of the marinade enveloping the chicken that really permeate this dish and make it shine.  The spices, seemingly simple, are subtle, but with a great build.  The first bite is pretty astonishing, but as you eat, each bite seems to take on a different characteristic.  Some bites are packed with the sweet and mellow taste of slow cooked onion, while other bites are flecked with cinnamon and coriander.  Occasionally I happened upon a strangely spicy bite, an unexpected, yet pleasant, surprise in a dish that is relatively mild on the spiciness scale.

And that’s one of the things that makes this recipe so mysteriously satisfying.  There is no abundance of spicy sauce.  There is no interplay between sour and spicy to test the agility of your taste buds.  It doesn’t taste predominantly of chicken, but it doesn’t taste mainly of rice, either.  Everything just sort of works together, tasting comforting and warm, well rounded, but also delicate.  Does it seem odd that I am speaking of a chicken dish as though it were a fine glass of wine?

I hate to make so many grand statements at once, but I really do think that this recipe is darn near close to perfect.  Even the casual side notes from the recipe’s authors are indispensible.  Taking their cue, I paid special attention to the layer of crisped rice and chicken that had formed on the bottom of the pot during the long baking time.  Though the recipe recommended that this layer of deeply browned bits be scraped from the pot and laid on top of the turned-out rice, I instead took the instinctive step of placing the browned bits directly into my mouth, a decision I highly recommend to anyone else who chooses to cook this.

All that said, I am not going to lie to you.  This is not a quick dish.  You are going to have to set aside some time to turn this baby out, but when you do, you will most certainly not regret it.  Make it a weekend affair, when you’ve got your afternoon ahead of you and you can take some time to prep the ingredients without being rushed.  Though the effort may seem to be a time challenge, I promise you that the result is nothing short of a reward.

Chicken Biryani

Nearly perfect as is, there are a couple of things about this recipe that I have altered only slightly.  One is the preparation of the garlic and ginger.  I find that grating both items into a bowl and then mashing them with a spoon is a far simpler and more reliable method of turning them into a paste, rather than trying to wrestle with them in a mortar and pestle.  I also decreased the amount of oil called for, as I had enough oil left over in the end that I thought it prudent to simply use less next time around.

From Mangoes and Curry Leaves, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

1 pound boneless chicken breasts or thighs, or a mixture

3 large cloves of garlic, grated finely (you want to end up with about 2 teaspoons total)

1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger

1 ½ teaspoons ground coriander

½ teaspoon cayenne

¼ teaspoon turmeric

¼ teaspoon garam masala

½ cup plain yogurt (full or reduced-fat are both fine)

2 teaspoons salt

2 cups basmati rice

3 medium-large onions (about 1 pound)

½ cup vegetable oil

1 cup minced cilantro leaves

2 tablespoons of water

Rinse the chicken, then chop into 1-inch cubes.  In a large bowl, combine the grated garlic and ginger, then mash together using the back of a spoon.  Add the chicken cubes to the bowl with the garlic and ginger.  Add the coriander, cayenne, turmeric, garam masala, yogurt, and 1 teaspoon of the salt.  Stir to mix until everything is combined, then cover with plastic wrap and allow to marinate in the refrigerator for 2 to 4 hours.

While the chicken is marinating, rinse the rice in several changes of cold water.  Place in a bowl, cover with water, and allow to soak for about half an hour.

About 1 ½ hours before you want to serve the dish, place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Slice the onions as fine as possible.  You will want about 3 cups of sliced onions.  Place a large heavy ovenproof pot with a tight-fitting lid over medium-high heat.  Add the oil and, when it is hot, add the onions.  Lower the heat to medium.  Cook until the onions are very soft, wilted, and just touched with golden brown (I love the way that is phrased), 12 to 15 minutes.  Lift the onions out of the hot oil and set aside.  There should be a little over ¼ cup of oil left in the pot.  Remove 2 tablespoons of oil from the pot and set aside for later.

When the onions are cooking, precook the soaked rice.  Place about 8 cups of water in a large pot and bring to a boil.  Add the remaining 1 teaspoon of salt, and allow the water to come back up to a boil.  Sprinkle in the rice.  Allow rice to boil for 4 to 6 minutes, or until the rice is no longer brittle but still firm to the bite.  Drain in a colander and set aside.

Place the heavy pot containing the oil over medium-high heat.  Distribute half of the chicken pieces over the bottom of the pot, then sprinkle on half the precooked rice.  Scatter half the cooked onions over the top, then sprinkle on half of the cilantro leaves.  Repeat with the remaining chicken, rice, onion, and cilantro.  Sprinkle on about 2 tablespoons of water, and drizzle on the reserved 2 tablespoons of oil.  Lay a sheet of aluminum foil over the top of the pot to cover it completely, then top with the lid.

Transfer the pot to the oven and bake for 1 hour.

Carefully remove the lid and the aluminum foil (the pot will emit a great deal of steam, so stand back and be careful to steer clear of the hot cloud).  Remove the biryani to a platter.  Scrape out the crusty layer of chicken and rice from the bottom of the pot, and lay it on top of the biryani.  Serve hot or warm.

Serves 6

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Indian Chicken Kebabs

27 Apr

When I was in India many years ago, I accompanied one of my cousins to the market so she could buy a chicken for that evening’s dinner.  She instructed me to wait for her in the car while she ran into the market, so I did.  Two minutes later, my cousin emerged from the market holding a plastic bag.  She set the bag on the floor in front of the seat next to her, and we started home.

Now, as an admission of my total ignorance, when my cousin told me that she was buying a chicken at the store, I very much imagined her buying what I knew as a market chicken: a headless, featherless, organless chicken that came in a shrink wrapped bag.  Keeping that in mind (and the fact that I was still a very dedicated vegetarian), you can imagine my alarm when the bag on the floor of the car began to softly and almost indiscernibly cluck.  No, I thought.  Clearly I am imagining that.  I watched the bag for a moment, wondering if the subtle crinkling of the bag’s sides was a product of the car’s bumping along a dirt road.  Um, is that chicken… I started to ask, when, as though sensing my mild horror (can chickens smell fear?) the bag started to freak out.  By the time we got home, the chicken bag was expanding from all directions.  My cousin grabbed the bag, holding it out to her side like, well, like a plastic bag with a frenzied chicken contained within, and hurried along to the backyard.

I didn’t see my cousin or the chicken again until about an hour later, when both emerged from the kitchen.  My cousin was holding a platter of fresh (no, really, I mean fresh) kebabs, which, moments after she set on the table, people began to rave about.  The perfect seasoning, the fresh spices, the juicy meat—I was the only person at the table not enraptured by the kebabs, because I was the only person at the table not eating the kebabs.  Vegetarianism aside, I could not help thinking of how quickly and matter-of-factly that chicken made its way to the table, and how impressed I was by the whole affair.  Forget buying a trussed and refrigerated organic chicken from Whole Foods, my cousin had just bought a chicken.

More than a decade later, now a beginning meat eater, I found myself telling that story to a friend.  After justifiably laughing at my discomfort, she then said, “I’ll bet those kebabs tasted fantastic.”  Weirdly, no one had ever brought that up before.  It seemed almost unbelievable that she was the first person to mention the actual kebab in the story.  Since it didn’t seem right to leave that part of the story unsolved, I felt it was my duty to dig up a recipe for chicken kebabs and see what all the fuss was about.

Though the chicken I used was nowhere near as fresh as the chicken in my cousin’s kebabs, I now understand the revelry that surrounded them. The chicken is moist while the outer breading is pleasingly crunchy, and the earthy spices combine with fresh green chilies to make a fantastic blend of lightly spicy and savory elements in each bite.  I may be many years late to this wonderful dish, but I feel that makes me uniquely qualified to insist that you not wait as long as I did to discover it.  Eat it now.

Indian Chicken Kebabs

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey Indian Cooking

Jaffrey’s original recipe called for slightly different ingredients and yielded a smaller number of larger kebabs.  I prefer a daintier portion of meat, so I made each kebab smaller, but I think these kebabs would be even better if they were sized into two or three bite portions.  I served the kebabs with basmati rice and a bit of cucumber and yogurt sauce, but you could also tuck one into a bit of naan to make yourself a lovely light meal.

Makes 8 kebabs

1 lb finely ground chicken (I bought ground chicken and then pulsed it in the food processor to make it even finer)

12 tablespoons panko breadcrumbs, or another very fine, dry breadcrumb

3/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 teaspoon garam masala

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds

1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh mint

1 or 2 fresh, hot green chilies, finely chopped

1/2 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped

2 teaspoons peeled, finely grated fresh ginger

1/2 medium fresh tomato, finely chopped

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

vegetable oil to line the bottom of a frying pan

lemon wedges

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

Combine the chicken, 4 tablespoons of the breadcrumbs, salt, garam masala, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cilantro, mint, green chilies, onion, ginger, tomato, and cayenne in a bowl.  Mix well and form 8 patties.  Put the remaining 8 tablespoons breadcrumbs on a plate and dip each patty in them.  There should be a thin layer of breadcrumbs on all sides.  Cover and refrigerate the patties in a single layer until needed.

Put enough oil in a large frying pan to cover the bottom lightly and set over medium-high heat.  When hot, put in the patties–only as many as the pan will hold in a single layer.  Cook for 3 minutes on each side.  Turn heat to medium and cook for another 2-3 minutes on each side.  Place cooked patties on a large baking sheet and place in preheated oven for 5 minutes to keep warm and continue cooking all the way through.  If you make several very small patties instead of 8 medium ones, it will not be necessary to continue cooking the patties in the oven.

Before eating, top the patties with a generous squeeze of lemon juice.

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Samosas in Phyllo

9 Mar

There are few words that exist on a sliding scale as slippery as that of the word “difficult.”  Some things are deemed difficult because they require a certain familiarity of skills before one is able to instinctively tackle them.  Other things can be referred to as difficult because they are time consuming and they ask a person to dedicate a great deal of effort and focus.  To me, something that is difficult is most often not really difficult at all (in terms of skill or effort), but rather simply unpleasant.  I may have no problem at all producing a trifecta of desserts for someone’s birthday, but I will not, under any circumstances I can currently think of, deep fry anything.

It’s not like I haven’t deep fried things before.  I’ve made fried poppadums, homemade sweet onion rings, and wonderfully crispy pakoras, but the problem was, I did not enjoy making any of those foods once I completed the preparation stage and was then forced to move on to the actual cooking stage.  Deep frying things makes your house smell like a soggy old french fry depository.  It is hot, messy, and, obviously, greasy, and I am always at a loss over what to do with all that spent oil.  Fortunately, my deep dislike of submerging things in hot oil never seemed to hold back my progress in the kitchen, so all was well.

Until, that is, I got it into my head that I was going to make samosas for a small event I had agreed to cater.

Though I knew I hated to fry things, I was convinced that I would be able to come up with a simple way to wrap and cook samosas that would not only avoid the step of having to deep fry anything, but also guarantee me a generous amount of wrapped samosas that were amenable to being frozen until the time arrived when I needed to bake them.

Taking inspiration from a wonderful tapas cookbook I often look to for ideas, I decided to wrap each samosa in a dual layer of phyllo dough.  It was my hope that brushing butter in between each layer of dough would make for a crisp finished product, and making sure to securely wrap each little package of spiced potatoes would ensure an end result that would both freeze well and take to baking straight from the freezer.

To make this long story short, I don’t know why I didn’t try this sooner.  The samosas, both baked after being frozen and baked immediately after being wrapped (for purposes of, ahem, quality control), were crisp, light, and lacking in any sort of heaviness or greasiness.  As an added bonus, the delicate nature of phyllo really allows the flavor of the perfectly spiced potato filling to take center stage, completely convincing me that, at least until I break down and decide to tackle a Spanish tortilla de patatas, my deep frying days have come to an end.

Samosas in Phyllo

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey Indian Cooking

4-5 medium potatoes, boiled in their jackets and allowed to cool

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 medium sized onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 cup shelled peas, fresh or frozen (if frozen, defrost them first)

1 tablespoon peeled, finely grated fresh ginger

1/2 to 1 fresh, hot green chili, finely chopped

3 tablespoons very finely chopped cilantro

About 3 tablespoons water

1 1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon garam masala

1 teaspoon ground, roasted cumin seeds (if you only have regular ground cumin, you can toast the teaspoon of cumin in a dry pan set over high heat.  The cumin will take only seconds to toast, so watch it carefully for browning and then immediately take it off of the heat and place it in a room temperature bowl or dish)

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons lemon juice

20 phyllo sheets, thawed if frozen (my sheets were 8.5″ x 13.5″ and, layered and cut into fifths, yielded 50 samosas)

4 tablespoons butter, melted then cooled

To make the filling, peel the potatoes and cut them into 1/4 inch dice.  Put 4 tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan and place over medium heat.  When hot, put in the onions.  Stir and fry them until they begin to turn brown at the edges.  Add the peas, ginger, green chili (1/2 or the whole thing, depending on how spicy you prefer things), cilantro, and 3 tablespoons water.  Cover, lower heat, and simmer until the peas are cooked.  Stir every now and then and add a little more water if the frying pan seems to dry out.

Add the diced potatoes, salt, ground coriander, garam masala, cumin, cayenne, and lemon juice.  Stir to mix.  Cook on low heat for 3-4 minutes, stirring gently as you do so.  Check balance of salt and lemon juice.  You may want more of both (I added more lemon juice, but felt the salt content was just fine).  Turn off the heat and allow the mixture to cool.

To fill and wrap the samosas, preheat oven to 375 degrees F (if you are wrapping and freezing the samosas, you can obviously skip this step).  Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.  Cover phyllo stack with a sheet of plastic wrap and then a dampened kitchen towel (this will keep the phyllo from drying out as you work).  Take one phyllo sheet from stack and lay it down on your work surface with a long side nearest you (keeping remaining sheets covered as you work) and brush lightly with butter. Top with another phyllo sheet and brush with more butter. Cut buttered phyllo stack crosswise into 5 strips (my sheets were 13.5 inches long, yielding 5 strips that were not quite 2.75 inches wide).

Place a tablespoon of filling near one corner of a strip (on the end that is nearest to you), then fold corner of phyllo over to enclose filling and form a triangle. Continue folding the strip (as one would fold a flag), maintaining a triangle shape. Put fully wrapped samosa triangle, seam side down, on a parchment-lined large baking sheet. Repeat process, making more triangles in the same manner, until you’ve used all the phyllo.

The samosas can be baked in a 375 degree oven, one sheet at a time, for 20-25 minutes, or until they are golden brown.  Cool them slightly on a wire rack before serving

If you plan to freeze the samosas, place them in the freezer on their parchment-lined baking sheets, and freeze for one hour.  Remove the samosas from the freezer, and stack them in an airtight container, separating each stack with a layer of parchment or wax paper.  The samosas will keep in the freezer for up to 1 month.  When you are ready to bake the frozen samosas, follow the baking directions for fresh samosas.  There is no need to adjust the baking time.

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