Skip to main content
oil free tandoori chicken
Here’s my cooking video on tandoori chicken

‘Tadoori’ chicken is one of the first recipes that I had downloaded from the net and cooked. Don’t remember the name of the site after all these years but it wasn’t a blog.

‘Tandoori’ came with a qualifier though. No hearty Loins of Punjab earthen tandoor (oven) to cook the chicken though. The Bengali in me made tandoori chicken in a microwave without feeling as if I had sinned.
Which I actually had.
Used to turn out fairly well though the micro would get messy and the chicken would not brown too well. We just have a grill function in our micro. This is the recipe for the microwave version.
Tandoori chicken was on my list of things to cook first in the new OTG.
Marinated it a couple of days back. Then Banu, our sous chef cum maid, didn’t come to work for two days. So I froze the chicken. Didn’t cook it to avoid the mess. This wasn’t required in retrospect.
This time I greased the baking tray with a bit of regular oil before placing the foil on it. The foil came off easily after cooking and the tray was clean. Washing it wouldn’t have been a problem.
The consistency of the chicken was pretty good which means that you could marinate this on the weekend, freeze it and grill it during the week to good effect.
The dish is oil free and has no artificial colours unlike the stuff on the streets.
oil free tandoori chicken
Here’s the recipe.
Prep & Marinate:
  • Pound or coarsely griund 2 green chillies, 3,4 garlic pods and 1/2 an inch of fresh ginger. You want to feel the texture and don’t want it to become a pulp. You could use a teaspoon each of ginger 
  • Add this mix to a small bowl, 30 g, of curd. I use packaged curds of Amul, Nestle or Danone etc. 
  • To this add 1 teaspoon each of garam masala powder & red chilli powder, 1/2 a teaspoon each of coriander, cumin powders & salt. Mix. this is your marinade
  • Apply the marinate on 2 chicken legs. Make slits in the skin for the masala to go in. The curd acts as a tenderiser too. One of the legs had skin on it. In such cases, slip in some marinate below the skin too.
  • Marinade for upwards of an hour.  In this case it was marinated for 2 days though!
marinated tandoori chicken

Cook:
  • Heat the oven at 200 for 10 minutes
  • Grease baking tray with a bit of oil. Put foil on it.
  • Place marinated chicken on this
  • Grill at 200 C for 25 min
  • Then toast (upper line on knob) for 5min at 200C. This will help brown the chicken and give it a nice colour
Morphy Richards OTGSONY DSC 
That’s it.

I ate it with plain chapatis. Was quite happy with the juiciness of the chicken, the texture and the colour. K approved too. Plus she got some crackling skin.
Tandoori chicken is of course a Punjabi dish and you could argue that tandoori chicken does not really run in my Bengali blood. True. But the dish was good. And it is fairly easy to make.
oil free tandoori chicken 

No Comments

Leave a Reply