Pahadi Chicken Curry

Try out this delicious Chicken Curry , great for a leisure holiday –Sundays, and absolutely perfect for any celebrations .

Sundays are never complete in my home without a Chicken dish. In other words I don’t feel like I have spent a fruitful Sunday without preparing a Chicken dish 🙂
It could be either a Baked Chicken or best of all a Chicken Curry.

Chicken Curry if prepared a bit dry..are lovely to be eaten along-with Rasam and Rice and If the curry is a bit more gravy kind then it goes well just with Rice ..or Chapathi…either the homemade Phulka or the versatile Tandoori Rotis…and,,, including Dal Tadka , raw onions and green chilly along with Chicken is always the best and yummy…

My husband and me, we always recall and cherish our experiences of having Chicken Curry with Tandoori Roti in Dhaba .It’s fun to sit on the Charpai and having your meal’s in a Dhaba. I also enjoy eating the curry with some raw onions and green chillies which comes as one of the accompaniment’s.

I believe most of the people reading this post are familiar with Dhaba and for those who aren’t :
In India, Dhaba means a roadside restaurant, which mostly serves Punjabi food. Dhabas are typically made of mud structures and have Charpais to sit upon while eating. Charpai is a wooden cot woven with knotted ropes.The rope would be either jute or any other good strong cotton ones.This word Dhaba has been adopted by many Indian restaurants across Europe and US as part of their name.

Speaking of having raw onions along with a curry meal, mostly lunch time..it reminds me of the summer times in Nagpur (summers here are extremely hot). Daily during lunch time in summer my mother would give me chopped raw onions to eat as an accompaniment in the meal- That’s because of the health benefit of having raw onions in summer- it helps to keep your body cool and eases off many of the summer complaints.

As a kid I was never able to eat it. But eventually and after getting used to..I now enjoy having it with spicy currys.

Well… coming back to my Sunday -Chicken Special days. Most of the times on Sundays I prepare “Saoji Chicken” with my grandma’s traditional recipe…But one Sunday I wanted to try out something different …So I prepared this Chicken Curry which I had seen on the television.

The Recipe I prepared is an adaptation of the recipe shown by Chef Aditya Bal

Recipe:

Ingredients Used?

1/2 kg Chicken pieces with bones and without skin

Fresh chopped Coriander leaves a handful (chopped along with it’s stem)

Mint Leaves less than a handful

1 inch ginger peeled and sliced

8-10 garlic cloves

1 tsp black peppercorns

1/2 inch cinnamon stick

1 tbsp coriander seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

2-3 cloves

1 small onion finely chopped

1 tsp ginger-garlic paste

1/4 cup curd

1/2 cup hot milk

Red Chilli Powder

Turmeric Powder

Garam Masala

Salt

Oil

How I Prepared It?

Marinate the Chicken pieces with ginger-garlic paste, red chilli powder, salt, turmeric, yoghurt and garam masala. Keep it in the refrigerator for an hour.

Meanwhile, heat a pan add the dry ingredients- coriander seeds, cumin seeds, cinnamon, black peppercorns, cloves and dry roast them briefly. Then add some oil (just 1tsp) to it and add the ginger and garlic.Roast them till you can smell the lovely aromas.Turn off the heat and then add the coriander leaves and mint leaves. We do not want the leaves to wilt away.Grind this all in a grinder.

This is the masala for this dish.

In another pan heat oil, add the chopped onion’s saute them. Add the masala. Saute it on a low flame. Add 1 tsp of turmeric at this stage and before it burns add the chicken pieces to it .Add required quantity of salt and red chilli powder(..if you need some more)..Saute all of it well on high flame.Till the chicken has just fried in the oil. It should just become white in colour and not get browned..

Now lower the flame and cover and cook it for around 10mins. Add milk and cover and cook it for another 15mins or more.

With all the spices in it the milk will curdle and this will make a thick gravy…and since the chicken is cooking along with this process of curdling of milk, the chicken pieces cooks up and become more soft and tender no doubt delicious..:)

This lovely Pahadi Chicken gravy..is ready to be savoured…

Akanksha

Leave a Reply Cancel reply