Tandoori Chicken and Fixins'

Good News: My roommate has a tripod so my pictures for my later meals will look better, I hope.

Story: I want to concentrate on different cuisines every week or two. This time it's Indian food. I may revisit a cuisine later and try some more dishes. So I went to the local Indian grocery store earlier in the week and spent three hours going up and down the aisles. After an hour, I could tell I was scaring the store owner so I went up to him and told him what I was doing. I made a bunch of Indian food today and I'll break it up into several blogs.

Apparently, there are a lot of Indians in Charlotte. Who knew? I went to a local place called "India Grocers" (not too sure where the owner got his marketing degree from). The store was located in Pineville which was about 15 minutes from my house.

I love Indian food and was really introduced to it during law school where some of my friends and I would go to a local Indian buffet (Taste of India) and stuff ourselves with naan, butter chicken, saag chicken, vegetable fritters and more. We found out very very quickly that eating 3 plates of Indian food is not a good pre-game for an hour long torts class.

While studying in Oxford, I found a great place called Aziz. This is probably the most amazing Indian, well technically Bengladeshi food, I have ever/will ever have aside from the food that some great friends have made me. Aziz has won the Top 10 Curry Award in the United Kingdom twice, the website is http://www.aziz.uk.com/scripts/homepage.asp . On Sundays, my friends and I would make a walk from our house through a park, through some of Oxford's farms, and eventually make it to Aziz which was about two miles away. It was well worth the walk there and back.

Inspired by my memories of Aziz, I decided to make tandoori chicken. Note: Apparently, the red color, the touchstone of tandoori chicken, is from food coloring. In that way, tandoori is the red velvet cake of the poultry world.

Making the marinade:

I mixed ginger power, cumin, salt, pepper, FRESH garlic (hooray!), paprika, and tumeric together.

It seemed like a lot of spices, but you have three pounds of chicken you can't be conservative with the amount of spice you put in. (After note: after trying the chicken, I definitely needed to add more spices) With all the spices I squeezed the juice of one lemon.

To prepare the chicken, here I used all drumsticks. It seems like the restaurants all use dark meat for tandoori chicken. I pulled the skins off of the chicken and washed them. Make sure you pat them dry or allow them to drain fully. The last thing you want is to water down your marinade.
Next, cut slits into the chicken. This does two things..First--it lets the marinade go deep into the chicken and second it makes cooking the chicken faster.

I mixed all the spices and the lemon into non-fat plain yogurt.

After you do that, you have this very fragrant--spiced pudding. Just not one you want to eat immediately.

I poured the spiced-gurt onto the drumsticks and got my hands dirty. You want to get the mixture deep into the chicken. I then put the chicken into the fridge and let them marry overnight.

When you're about ready to cook, take the chicken out for about 20-30 minutes before grilling. I lightly oiled the grill rack and put the chicken on the grill making sure that I scraped the excess marinade off the chicken.

I learned that you have to resist the urge to move the chicken and constantly check on it. I grilled the drumsticks on their first side for 8 minutes and got pretty nice grill marks.

I then flipped over the chicken and let the pieces grill covered until they were done. Grilling chicken is tricky. Since the pieces are odd shaped couple that with inconsistent thickness and it's a tough task.

A good rule of thumb that I use when grilling is putting the bigger pieces of first and also try to put them in the middle. That way you're more likely to have your chicken done all around the same time.

To make sure the chicken is done, see if the juices run clear or cut into and guestimate if the temperature is hot enough (160F).

I put cold fresh tomatoes and onion slices to eat with the chicken. I also put on the side some mango chutney which was a great compliment with the tandoori chicken.

Ingredients: Chicken, yogurt, tumeric, ginger powder, cumin, salt, paprika, pepper, FRESH garlic, lemon, onion, tomato

Wish List: I just needed to put in some more tumeric, salt and pepper into the initial spice mix.