The Indian subcontinent · Volume 13, The Tandoor Wall, the Wagah Line and a Contested Butter Chicken
Tandoori chicken
Delhi, out of Peshawar
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Hands on 20 minutes · Waiting 3 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Chicken pieces, marinated in yoghurt, ginger, garlic and spice, are skewered and cooked in a tandoor's fierce, direct radiant heat until charred at the edges and smoky through. The documented modern history traces to Kundan Lal Gujral at Moti Mahal, Peshawar, in the 1920s to 1930s, using an oven that had, until then, been used almost exclusively for bread, not meat; the recipe and the tandoor itself both travelled with Gujral to Delhi at Partition. A widely repeated claim that archaeologists have found tandoor-like ovens and charred chicken bones at Harappan sites dating to roughly 3000 BCE is real and named, but reaches this chapter only through popular science writing rather than a primary excavation report, and should be read as a claim archaeologists have made, not settled history.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 20 minutes, plus at least 3 hours marinating.
Ingredients
- 800g chicken pieces, skin removed, deep slashes cut into the flesh
- 1 cup yoghurt, hung in muslin 15 to 20 minutes to thicken
- 2 tbsp Kashmiri red chilli paste
- 1.5 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
- 2 to 3 tbsp mustard oil, smoked and cooled
- 1 tsp garam masala
- 0.5 tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder
- to taste salt and black salt to taste
- as needed melted butter, for basting
Method
- Combine the hung yoghurt, chilli paste, ginger-garlic paste, mustard oil, garam masala, Kashmiri red chilli powder and salt and black salt into a smooth marinade.
- Rub thoroughly into the slashed chicken, working the marinade into the cuts. Cover and refrigerate 3 to 4 hours, or overnight for a deeper cure.
- Skewer the chicken and cook in a tandoor, or a very hot oven or kamado, 10 to 12 minutes, basting with melted butter, then a further 2 minutes until charred at the edges and cooked through.
What a modern chef changes
The wall judged by smoke, not by a thermometer alone.
Rung 1
Method
- Run a dedicated home clay tandoor or a kamado closed and indirect, meat suspended clear of any direct flame, rather than an open oven grill, since the radiant wall heat, not simply high air temperature, is what a tandoor actually does.
- Smoke the mustard oil before it goes into the marinade, heated until just smoking then cooled, a real, documented step in the credible recipe this chapter draws on, which mellows the oil's raw pungency into something rounder without losing its character entirely.
- Rest the cooked chicken briefly off the heat before serving, letting the char settle rather than serving it straight off the skewer, so the smoke reads as flavour rather than as surface bitterness.