Dakshini Murgh (Chicken with Roasted Coriander in an Almond Curry Sauce)

Dakshini Murgh
Chicken with Roasted Coriander in an Almond Curry Sauce

I decided to make a huge Indian dinner for friends. 10 people, 7 dishes, and 1 day of amazing smells, colours, textures and flavours.

The menu:
Dakshini Murgh (Southern Indian Chicken with Roasted Coriander in an Almond Curry Sauce)
Jhinga Aur Ghia (Shrimp with Zucchini)
Chana Dal (Yellow Split Peas)
Saag Aloo (1 version with spinach with russet potatoes and one with yams)
Akhrote ka raita (Yogurt with Walnuts and Cilantro)
Cachumber (Tomato, Onion, and Cilantro Relish)
Basmati Chaaval (Plain Basmati Rice)

The menu concept was to combine a meat dish and a fish dish (because fish is generally made so heavy in restaurants with too much oil, and it can be such a delicate creation when you're careful with the spices. Madhur Jaffrey of "Indian Cooking" is the queen of spices, thus I can have the share the royal wisdom), then add a vegetable dish (the saag. I had yams left over and decided the sweetness might complement the spinach), a yogurt dish to cool the palate, plain basmati rice (more of an undertaking than you might think) and a relish for bite (in case one of the dishes ended up being a bit underwhelmind and needed some assistance). Then I found out there would be more vegetarians than I had expected and added a dal for protein. I also thought the nutty flavour of the split peas would go well with the almonds in the chicken and walnuts in the yogurt, for all the non-vegetarians and vegans. I bought the ingredients in advance, and spent 7 hours cooking leisurely. Nice way to spend the day.

The first recipe:

Chicken with Roasted Coriander in an Almond Curry Sauce
Coriander Seeds
Funegreek Seeds
Black Peppercorns
Oil
Black Mustard Seeds
Cinnamon Stick
3 1/2 lbs chicken pieces, legs and breast, skin removed, bone-in, cut into pieces
Onions, thinly sliced
garlic, cut into slivers
ginger, grated (I diced, finely)
A tomato
turmeric
cayenne
salt
lemon juice
almond milk (the recipe actually calls for coconut milk, but almond should work fine)
hot green chilis, sliced in half lengthwise

This is a southern dish because of the fenugreek and the coconut milk (replaced here by the almond milk). It's not as spicy as northern curries, but you can add more heat by adding more cayenne or more green chilis. It should be very rich from the milk, so remove all the fat from the chicken pieces before browning them or the curry will be swimming in fat. To get a good flavour use a combination of breast and leg meat. Wings will give you mostly fat and not enough meat to make it worth it, unless you're using an entire chicken, then hack the whole thing up and throw everything in except the easily-removable skin. Half and half leg and breast works well, or try more leg than breast. The leg meat will be more tender.

Normally I'd do the whole chicken, but I wanted to make this relatively quick and easy. I went to Toronto's St. Lawrence Market, to De Liso's Fine Meats, and bought their Mennonite-raised chicken, which is as close to organic you can come without the official labeling and the astronomical prices. I walk into the market:

To my brother: "I'm looking for chicken."
Brother: "There's a meat place..."
Me: "Yeah. There are a whole lot of meat places here. We're not just going to any meat place. This is an impotant decision." We went to De Liso's.
Post chicken purchase:
The very attractive meat guy at De Liso's: "People come to us for our chicken. Best chicken in the market."

Awareness dawns on my brother, thus justifying my obsession for high-quality poultry. I am attracted to the best, it seems.

Instructions:
Roasted coriander? The first step of this recipe is to roast the whole coriander seeds, fenugreek and black peppercorns in a dry skillet over medium-high heat. doesn't seem like roasting to me, since it's not in the oven, but there's no oil, so I suppose to an Indian cook it could seem more like roasting (more likely this spice mixture is roasted in a more traditional way, and this is the closest we can come in a North American kitchen. Kind of like a tandoor oven, or especially like making naan under the boiler instead of throwing them against the side of the oven to cook). I was not going to mess this up, so I heat the skillet for the called-for 2-3 minutes, added the spices for a minute and a half, and then took them off the heat to cool. I didn't have a coffee grinder so I diced the spices finely with my brother's new chef knife and silently thanked Alex for his wonderful selection of kitchenware.

Then I added a ton of oil to the biggest pot I could find and set it over medium-high heat. When it was hot I put in the first batch of chicken pieces, only to remember that I was supposed to add the mustard seeds and cinnamon stick first! So those got added a second later, and I don't think it made much difference since they fell between the pieces and started popping immediately, just like they were supposed to. After the chicken was brown I removed it to a huge bowl and added the next batch. 20 minutes later all the chicken was brown.

Now the recipe messed up. Not me, I swear. The chicken was supposed to be removed to a bowl, but the rest of the recipe never says to add the chicken back to the pot, so I added it all back right away. The problem is that now you're supposed to add the onions and garlic, but there's so much chicken that there's no way the onions are going to get a chance to touch the bottom of the pot. Steamed onion does not exist in India. If oil is not involved, it's not a cooked dish. So I took most of the chicken back out and hoped the onion and garlic would sauté and not get stuck to the chicken pieces that I removed from the pot.

When that (miraculously) happened, I added the ginger and tomato. A few minutes later I turned down the heat and added the "roasted" and crushed spices, turmeric, cayenne, salt and lemon juice.

Now was the tricky part. You're supposed to use coconut milk, so when you open the can you skim off the thick coconut cream that sits at the top. Then you top up the can with water and dump the whole thing into the pot (which presumably holds the chicken now). At the very end, after simmering for 25 minutes, you add the coconut cream you skimmed off, like you would a whipping cream. With almond milk, no cream collects at the top of the container. I didn't even shake it! No good. I added a little less than the equivalent of a can of coconut milk, and then added about a fifth of a can of water as a rough estimation. I didn't want to add too much water, but better too much than too little, since it can be boiled off later if you added too much. If it burns because you didn't add enough in the first place, well, you're out of luck.

Anyway, I brought the pot to a boil post-milk/water addition, covered the pot, turned down the heat again, and let it simmer for the 25 minutes. Then I turned off the heat, let the pot cool down and went to another dish. My point here was to let the fat settle on the top of the chicken, to skim off. Often Indian foods taste better the day after, when they've been reheated and the spices have had more of a chance to meld together. I was kind of trying to fast-track this process. Not so successful, but hopefully not a completely wasted effort.

Verdict? Everyone loved it. Except me. I should have boiled off more of the liquid. The almond milk was more watery than coconut milk, and it should have been reduced to concentrate the flavour. I should have known that since there's no chicken broth added to the dish the flavour is only going to come from the chicken itself (meat, fat and bones) and from the milk. Southern Indian food is a lot less...well, overwhelmingly flavourful than Northern Indian food, but there's something very homey and comforting in the mild sweetness of the flavours. Not a disappointment, per se, but not as great as the recipe sounded. At the end I garnished with the green chilis, and the dish looked beautiful. A respectful attempt.