NYT Sheet pan chicken tikka masala

The title grabbed my attention straight away. Then I thought, are we talking about chicken tikka, or as mentioned in the title, chicken tikka masala?

Chicken tikka masala, so the story goes, is a product of the British-Indian culinary exchange of the 1970s. There’s probably some truth to that. Either way, it has become one of the most popular dishes in the UK, eaten in restaurants and cooked at home alike. It seems that everyone I know has their own personal way of making it, with variations in the consistency of the sauce.

I’ve made it myself many times, adjusting the quantities of individual ingredients to suit my taste, and to adjust the colour of the dish. Orange or bright red, or anywhere in between.

I marinate the chicken for 24 hours in the fridge with lemon, ginger, spices, and yogurt. For the sauce, I use chopped tomatoes, onions, cream, and more spices. Some people use garam masala, but to me that feels like cheating, and not all garam masalas are the same anyway. Just don't use so much spices that the dish blows your head off. I prefer it medium to mildly spiced so that I can taste everything without it being overpowering. Turn the dish into something of your own

I partly cook the marinated chicken in a pan first, then add the sauce ingredients as I go. I’ve never used garlic in this dish, as I don’t see the point -- let the spices do their own thing. Some people cook the marinated chicken under the grille, and or in the oven on a pan, I've done it that way too, but I personally find the chicken to be more tender in a pan It depends what you want from your chicken tikka masala.

In 2001, then-British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook famously declared chicken tikka masala to be “a true British national dish.”

Unlike this video, I use pilau rice:

 
Last edited:
Aslam obit

NYT 12/22/22 - "Instead, the bright tomato-tinted lights of fame shone on one man: Mr. Aslam, who immigrated to Scotland from a village outside Lahore, Pakistan, when he was a teenager, and who opened the restaurant Shish Mahal in Glasgow in 1964.

What seems to have established Mr. Aslam as the inventor of the dish was an unsuccessful 2009 bid by the Scottish member of Parliament Mohammad Sarwar to have the European Union recognize chicken tikka masala as a Glaswegian specialty. In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Mr. Aslam explained that he had added some sauce to please a customer once, and you could almost hear him shrug.

In Aslam family lore, it was a local bus driver who popped in for dinner and suggested that plain chicken tikka was too spicy for him, and too dry — and also he wasn’t feeling well, so wasn’t there something sweeter and saucier that he could have instead? Sure, why not. Mr. Aslam, who was known as Mr. Ali, tipped the tandoor-grilled pieces of meat into a pan with a quick tomato sauce and returned them to the table.

“He never really put so much importance on it,” Asif Ali said. “He just told people how he made it.”"
 

You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top