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Chicken Hyderabadi for the typical kitchen took a little work to nail down, but it was so worth it. Creamy, coconutty, and incredibly rich, this spicy Indian chicken curry is actually quite easy to make at home, doesn't require an extensively stocked spice cabinet, requires minimal babysitting, and is exceptionally satisfying.
When I first glanced through this recipe, it seemed really simple. Then it won the recipe vote back in December, I read through it a second time, and realized it was much more complicated than I first thought. To start with, it calls for browning then poaching a whole chicken in a pressure cooker to three whistles. I had a few immediate concerns about this procedure. Firstly, I don't know that many people who own a pressure cooker. Secondly, I own two pressure cookers (a 8-qt Presto and an instant pot), neither of which give discrete whistles to be used for timing. I googled pressure cooker three whistles and the most practical advice was to ignore the whistle concept and use a timer. Third, since the header advises making this dish ahead of time to give the flavors time to develop, I wasn't convinced pressure cooking was even a logical choice. It saves an hour of cooking time, true, but you can be doing something else during that hour and pressure cookers still aren't very common here. With those primary concerns in mind, my goal for testing the chicken Hyderabadi from Five Morsels of Love was to try following the recipe as closely as possible and then, if it was worth repeating, come up with an alternate method for people who don't own pressure cookers.
The masala (spice mix) in this recipe is really intriguing. You take your masala, grind it into a paste, and stuff it into the chicken without cooking it. There was no explanation about why this is done and neither making this dish nor the internet have fully answered my questions. I wasn't sure how stuffing it into the chicken's internal cavity would flavor the meat and it turns out it didn't flavor the poached chicken meat. Instead, the act seems to tenderize the meat and temper the spices, eliminating a need for marination and taking the eyebrow-raising 20 cloves of garlic and 10 dried chilies and mellowing them out to yield a well-balanced, very flavorful curry. Stuffing a chicken with a masala and roasting it seems to be a reasonably popular recipe in Indian cuisine, but there's a substantial amount of variation and none are like this rendition. Most of the stuffings include rice or eggs with the spices and the chicken is served straight from the oven rather than cooking the masala further and adding back in the tender cooked chicken pieces.
I ran into multiple stumbling blocks making this chicken Hyderabadi recipe as directed. To begin with, I wasn't sure what kind of dried red chilies to use, and my masala never turned as red as the one in the photo. Then, without pre-grinding the smaller spices together first like the voice in my head told me to, blending all of the spices together in a food processor yielded a chunky puree with large pieces of cinnamon, chilies, clove, and coriander seed still intact. I typically hate crunching into whole spices while eating and this dish was no exception. There was quite a bit of masala leftover after stuffing the chicken cavity and I even used a larger chicken than specified in the recipe (3 lb instead of 2.2 lb) - this I opted to save for the later steps. Next, the original recipe called for an entire cup of ghee to be used in browning the chicken. To me, that implies something closer to deep-frying the chicken rather than "browning" it, and even ¼ cup of ghee was too much. The ghee spit and spattered all over my kitchen (and me) and in the end I needed to use a gravy strainer to remove all the excess that was sitting on top of my curry. Further, browning my trussed chicken in my pressure cooker (I opted for the instant pot) was a nightmare, because there wasn't enough room in the pot to rotate the whole chicken. I wound up tearing my poor chicken in several places trying to get it to turn, while attempting to avoid getting hit with the spitting hot ghee. After these preliminary steps, the rest of the process was smooth sailing. I cooked my chicken for 25 minutes in the instant pot, so about 20-22 minutes in a regular pressure cooker. It came out incredibly tender and succulent.
Once the chicken had rested 5-10 minutes, I removed the masala and started cooking that, along with the "extra" masala and a generous handful of cashews. Usually in Indian curry recipes I see the nuts being ground into a paste, and I was somewhat worried to see that they weren't here. However, I surprised myself by enjoying the cooked cashew pieces and found the sauce thickened quite a bit even though the nuts were left whole. As the nutty masala sautéed in a dutch oven, I started pulling apart my chicken, removing the skin and keeping only the meat. This was added to the masala and cashews, along with additional heat in the form of "red chile pepper", which I interpreted to mean cayenne pepper, and cooked another 5 minutes until slightly thickened, hot (temperature and spice level), and ready to serve (or store for later). Add salt as you feel necessary, it will likely need ½ - 2 teaspoons, depending on your palate.
While I was home for the holidays, I forced my family to be taste-testers for the modified version of this recipe, where I adjusted the methods and a few ingredients to overcome the stumbling blocks I had hit. That version was a success and is the rendition I am posting here for making chicken Hyderabadi.
Original source: Five Morsels of Love
Chicken Hyderabadi
Ingredients
Method
- Rinse the chicken well, both inside and outside, removing any giblets from the interior cavity. Pat dry.
- Grind the cloves, cardamom pods, turmeric, coriander seeds, and poppy seeds together in a spice grinder until a fine powder forms. Add to a blender or food processor, together with the remaining masala ingredients. Blend to a smooth paste, adding another ½ - 1 tablespoon water only if necessary.
- Reserve ½ the masala and place in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Stuff the chicken cavity with the other half of the masala paste, then tie the legs together with twine.
- Preheat the oven to 375 F, moving the rack to the lower middle level. Heat the ghee or oil over medium heat in a dutch oven. Carefully lower the masala-stuffed chicken into the dutch oven and fry until brown on all sides. Add the coconut cream (or milk) and water, cover the dutch oven with a secure lid, and place in the oven. Bake for 75 - 90 minutes.****
- Remove the chicken from the dutch oven and let it rest on a cutting board for 5 minutes. Transfer the liquid from the dutch oven to a bowl for later use.
- Heat the tablespoon of neutral oil in the now-emptied dutch oven over medium heat. Carefully remove the stuffing from the chicken and add the masala back to the dutch oven, together with the cashews and the masala from the fridge. Saute for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. If you prefer a smooth sauce, puree the sauce now in a high-powered blender, then return once more to the Dutch oven on low heat.
- Meanwhile, break down the cooked chicken, removing the skin and bones, reserving the meat as medium-sized pieces.
- Add the chicken pieces and any reserved juices to the cooking masala and cashews, continue sauteing another 4-5 minutes. Check the seasoning, add the cayenne powder and salt to taste. Reduce the heat to low and continue cooking 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens and the oil floats to the top.
- If necessary, use a gravy strainer to separate the oil from the sauce (you shouldn't need to do this unless you opted to use more than ¼ cup of ghee).
Notes
**The original recipe called for 1 cup of ghee. I found this to be dramatically more than necessary, and scaled back to a less wasteful amount.
***If you cannot find coconut cream, full-fat coconut milk will work almost as well.
****The chicken can also be poached in the coconut milk-water using a pressure cooker. This step took 25 minutes in my instant pot. I didn't notice any substantial difference between the chicken cooked with the two different methods.
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