Tandoori Chicken

[jdbower]

Wow! Thanks Syzygies! We've got an Indian food store nearby (still searching for a decent Chinese store, but hopefully an H-Mart will open in Burlington, MA soon) and having some good Tandoori Chicken at a restaurant was one of the last straws that convinced the wife that a KK would be a good investment. Thanks for the pointers on how to deliver, looks delicious.

[LarryR]

Thanks for the tips Syzygies, you're far more ambitious than I, I bought Tandoori Masala and plain yogurt to mix it with. I guess the reason I was shooting for a high temp was due to everything I read says traditional Tandoori is done around 900 degrees so I thought I'd try and replicate it with my ceramic. Makes sense thought that even though it's ceramic we're really talking apples and oranges in terms of cookers . . . still my take her up to around 600/650. I'll be sure to post some pictures! One last thing, any thoughts on how long thighs will take? I'm thinking about 5 - 7 min a side . . . I have a thermapen so I can check the temp, just don't want to be opening the cooker more than twice.

[billyboy]

Re: Tandoori Chicken

I do tandoori all the time and it is easy.

Pick up a package of tandoori mix at an Indian market. It contains all the spices one will need.

Add yogurt (8 oz or so depending on how spicy you want it) to the spice package and put in a bowl or plastic bag and mix very well.

Add the chicken thighs to the mix after you have made some made some cuts/punctures into the chicken so the sauce gets inside the meat. Refrig over night.

Get the KK to 400 degrees and add the chicken and small round thin slices of onions

and place them on top of the chicken.

After about 40 min, turn the chicken over.

The chicken is ready after about 1.5-2 hours depending on how much chicken is cooking, etc

I cook this indirectly.

This is a no fail recipe and I am making it tonight.

[Syzygies]

I bought a Trompo King and Trompo King - Four Spike System after a tip from the Trompo King on sale for Cinco de Mayo thread. I'm returning their grate. As noted in the thread, there are various alternatives, particularly if one owns the KK double bottom drip pan.

As promised, my first cook was tandoori chicken from Ranjit Rai (recipe above in this thread). We were thrilled how it came out, and plan to make many similar experiments using the Trompo King.

Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbecue by Ranjit Rai

I like having five spikes, and a small drip pan I can carry already loaded from the kitchen to the KK. The Trompo King drip pan is however a bit small for this purpose. As Ranjit Rai notes, 482 F is a typical tandoori chicken cooking temperature. Using the KK double bottom drip pan on my lower grates, and the Trompo King on my main grates, I was able to easily reach and hold 480 F to 500 F for hours, for a completely indirect 30 minute cook. This is much longer than Indian timings, though my chicken pieces are larger, and there's essentially no radiant heat in this setup. One might want one's tandoori chicken to come out a bit more beat up from the fire? Approaches I've taken in the past risk too much fire crisping the outside of the chicken, before it cooks through. Using the Trompo King was the least stressful tandoori cook I've ever experienced. There was plenty of taste of the fire, and one could dial up the abuse factor by cooking at a higher temperature. As always, temperature readings in any fire-based cooker are relative to the design and configuration.

The KK is far more nimble than a traditional tandoor at changing temperature. One might ideally want to cook at a somewhat lower temperature until the chicken cooks through to the bone, then let the temperature climb at the end for exterior abuse. I'm thinking start at 450 F, end at 550 F.

Big picture, one wants to somehow cook tandoori dishes free-standing vertical, and indirect.

If one has the equipment, the recipe is most easily prepared by grinding the dry spices in a Vita-Prep dry ingredient bowl, then grating the ginger and garlic on a medium Microplane, then blending everything together with the oil, salt, and yogurt in the same Vita-Prep bowl. Now vacuum pack the marinade together with the chicken. One could easily get by with less marinate this way, but like any brine process that could affect the equilibrium. Just don't stress over exact marinade to meat proportions. The marinade ingredients are not expensive.

Cleanup is a different issue at 500 F, not the target temperature for the Trompo King design. One should oil the drip pan, or line it with foil, or resign oneself to long soaks as part of cleanup.

Edited May 15, 2021 by Syzygies

[Troble]

Thanks for the tips @Syzygies looks great and a great use of the Trompo King

[tekobo]

I'm glad I came back to find this thread.  I had some slightly tough hogget chops and remembered the Indians' use of papaya and other ingredients to tenderise meat.  It worked out really well and, not wanting to waste my papaya, I used it on a chicken drumsticks and hogget chops.

Here are the chicken drumsticks on my 16KK.  I used the recipe for chicken tikka from the Ranjit Rai book recommended by @Syzygies above.  They have a neat trick, which is to freeze your chicken for 15 minutes before putting it on the grill.  This is to stop the potentially sloppy cream and yogurt marinade from falling off before it gets a chance to cook.  It worked a treat and the chicken was very tasty.

I cooked the lamb chops a couple of days later and they were much more awkward to skewer.  This is where the trompo king might come in handy.  I don't have one so I threaded my chops onto this prongy piece of kit that I bought from a tandoor seller.  At first it all looked very precarious but as the meat cooked and firmed up it all worked out just fine.

 

 

[tony b]

Thanks for the tip @tekobo about the quick freeze before putting the tandoori on the grill. Gonna remember that one! 

[Troble]

@tekobo you are so ingenious! Nicely done 

[MacKenzie]

@Tekobo, those lamb chops are looking particularly tasty. 

[C6Bill]

Yum !!!!!

[tekobo]

The chops were indeed tasty.  I thought that two days marinading with papaya might turn them to mush but they still had good bite.  @tony b, that pre-freezing trick is interesting.  I am wondering whether to try it for when I want a truly black and blue steak so that the interior stays blue while the outside goes nice and crunchy.  

[tony b]

I've done frozen steak before as an experiment. Straight from the freezer (solid) and onto the grate. It works best on thinner steaks (<1") to keep them from overcooking. Since you like a "black & blue" steak, it should work well for you with a thicker cut like this one. 

Edited May 14, 2023 by tony b

[tekobo]

Awww.  That is making me sooo hungry.  Going to put steak on the order for supper very very soon....

[Syzygies]

Try sous vide before chilling or freezing the steak? Cook in a water bath at target serving temperature (desired doneness) for longer than anyone says. Like four to six hours for a cheaper cut, full of flavor but of need of tenderness. Then with a really cold start, one cooks the outside to desired doneness. As long as the interior can be plausibly served, it will be both cooked just right and very tender. We mathematicians call this replacing an equality with an inequality. Rather than hitting a mark, you're just trying not to overshoot on the interior.

[tekobo]

Thanks for the sous vide suggestion @Syzygies.  I have three reasons against at the moment 1) my steaks are already frozen, 2) I don't necessarily want the change in texture that comes with sous vide cooking and 3) it is an extra process and time between me and eating my steak!  That said, I am having to wait for my husband to go away for work next week before I try this out.  He is less keen on blue steak and I want to enjoy the pure delight of pleasing myself with this cook.  

[tekobo]

Goaded on by recent steak cooks on here, @C6Bill you know who you are, I got out this thick veal steak to see what it would be like, cooked from frozen.

Partway through the cook I realised that @Syzygies was probably right and that, in order to get the close to edge to edge very rare steak that I would like, I really should have defrosted it and gone with the sous vide pre-cook and then hot and fast sear.   All that became irrelevant though when I forgot to get the steak out of the KK soon enough.  It was already at 40C when I took it off the grill.

After a bit of resting it was much more cooked than I would have wanted it but…it was very juicy and delicious.  In fact it was cooked perfectly for my husband, who was away on business.  I ate it all by myself and thoroughly enjoyed my gluttony.  I will try for the perfect steak again soon but this was a good substitute.  I’ll aim to take some prettier pictures next time too!

.  

 

 

 

 

 

[tony b]

I always cook veal more done than I would a beef steak. I like that just blush in the center. 

[tekobo]

Yeah, @tony b, you are probably right.  The texture of that veal was good, just pink in the centre.  Will go on experimenting and will figure out whether it is worth continuing a thread about frozen steaks here on a thread about tandoori chicken....