Tandoori Chicken

Tandoori Chicken
July 13, 2011

When I came back home after work, I took out 4 chicken drum sticks (chicken legs) from the freezer and placed them in the refrigerator to thaw them out overnight.

The next day morning before leaving for work, I took them out of the refrigerator and peeled the skin off of the legs. It wasn’t that easy. Cutting the skin with a knife helps a lot :-)

In a deep dish, I poured some tandoori paste. The instructions on the tandoori paste bottle said I needed 8 table spoons of the paste mixed with 6 table spoons of yoghurt for 4 legs. Well, I didn’t have 8 table spoons worth of the paste leftover in the bottle. I think I ended up with just about 5 or so table spoons, which turned out to be sufficient.

I mixed the paste with yoghurt (about 3 or 4 table spoons). I then made a few gashes on the chicken legs with a knife so that the paste could get inside and marinate well. I put the legs into the deep dish which contained the paste, and rubbed the paste into the chicken. I then placed the dish in the refrigerator to marinate for the day.

After I got back home, I set the oven to pre-heat at the maximum temperature it had – my oven had a setting for a little over 500 degrees. While the oven was heating up, I took the chicken out of the refrigerator. The book I was following wanted me to melt 6 table spoons of ghee to coat over the legs. Well, I just had about 3 or 4 table spoons of ghee left. I melted them in a vessel over the stove. 
That quantity of ghee was more than enough to coat all the 4 legs. The step about coating the ghee over the chicken is so as to keep the inside of the chicken moist while the roasting process takes place.

The book now told me that I had to place the chicken over a wire frame over a deep oven dish. Now again, I had no wire frame or anything similar I could think, so I placed the chicken on a flat oven tray. I poured the ghee over the chicken legs. Turned them over and poured more over on the other side.

When the oven was pre-heated, I placed the tray with the chicken legs into the oven, and set the timer for 10 minutes. On hind sight, I think another 5 more minutes may have worked even better. Anyways, at the end of the 10 minutes I took the tray out of the oven and kept the oven still on. I poured out some of the ghee which was pooling around the chicken. I guess that’s why the wire frame would have helped. I dabbed on some more of the left over marinade in the deep dish to both sides of the chicken using a spoon. The book suggests a brush for this purpose, which was another thing I didn’t have. As you can see, I’m not fully equipped yet for this venture.

Once I finished dabbing on the marinade, I placed the tray back inside the oven, and switched the oven off after I closed the door on it. Set the timer for 25 minutes. While that was cooking, I took out a plate and took out some onions and tomatoes, and sliced a few pieces and laid them around on the plate. I sprinkled some vinegar on the onions so that they lose their sting. At the end of the 25 minutes, took the legs out of the oven, placed them on the plate in the middle of the tomatoes and the onions, and it made for a hearty dinner.