Hi and a huge welcome, in Steve's kitchen. Today we're going to be creating a
chicken tikka masala and making popadoms. This not only looks gorgeous, it's going
to taste delicious and it is so simple to make. So come on let's get and make
chicken tikka masala.
We'll start by preparing our chicken, I've got two boneless pieces of breast
here, now you could use chicken on the bone if you like. What I'm going to do is
just cut this up into cubes. I do think breast works quite well for
this sort of dish. Then we're going to take those chicken pieces, pop them into
a bowl. Now because we're making a student meal we can cheat a little bit,
I've gone for a good quality chicken tikka powder. Now if you've got a good
collection or if you're buying a collection of spices, over time you can
use individual spices but for this recipe this is going to work just fine.
Now I'm going to put about four to five tablespoons of this tikka powder over
the chicken. We don't want to skimp on this at all, get your hands in there now
and massage the tikka into the chicken. Now that's starting to look and smell
absolutely beautiful. Now waste not want not
I used the zest of this lemon when I was making that strawberry cheesecake the
other day. I'm now going to use the juice of half a lemon, I want to squeeze that
in between my fingers to catch any pips. The lemon juice will help tenderize the
chicken and adds a lovely souring flavor. We're now going to take about a cup of a
beautiful thick yogurt. Now don't use a low-fat yogurt for this, now I'm going to
mix that through with a spoon till I get this lovely marinade. That's stage one and
a very important stage of our chicken tikka masala, we want this to marinade
for at least two or three hours to let the flavors develop. Now I've let this
marinade for a couple of hours if you have time you'll do this overnight and let
all those flavors get in there but this is going to be just fine, it would be
great if we could barbeque or roast this chicken in the oven but this is a
student meal we haven't got an oven and we're going
to make this very simple and just do it in the pan and it's still going to be
absolutely delicious. So come on now I've got a pan on a medium heat you could add
a little oil, don't put too much oil in though because there's
already oil in the yogurt and the meat we're going to take our pieces of
chicken and we're just going to lay it in the pan and by not adding oil into
the pan what's going to happen is all the flavors are going to stick to the
meat. You don't want to have this too hot otherwise we'll burn everything and don't
be turning the chicken over too quickly either. You see all the the oils that are
coming out of the meat they're going to eventually stick to the surface of the
chicken and we get that lovely seasoning all over our meat. Now for the first
minute or so you may get a lot of moisture in the chicken, don't worry
about that we want that to evaporate off. Now you'll note that I haven't turned
the chicken over yet and most of the sauce has started to dry up so we can now
turn our chicken pieces over. Now you can see the marinade is starting to thicken
up and it's caramelizing and starting to coat over the chicken. Now at this point
the chickens beautifully and coated I'm going to take a couple of tablespoons of
oil and the last stage of this we're just going to fry the chicken up and get
some nice crispy Brown surfaces to it. So a few minutes later I'm getting that
lovely color that I want, we've got these beautiful pieces of chicken tikka I'm
just going to pop these pieces of chicken tikka onto a plate. Now that's
two batches of chicken tikka, look how beautiful that is. I know it's not
perfect chicken tikka but trust me the flavors are intense and it tastes
delicious. Oh wow wow the spices are intense, time
for us to make our sauce. Now although I haven't got all my equipment, mortar and
pestle and things, we're still going to make a really fantastic sauce. A lot of
the curry sauces start with those base ingredients of tomatoes and onions
and because I can't blend my onions down I'm going to dice them up fairly finely.
Now to get a nice fine dice on your onions, cut them horizontally first from
the front edge and do leave a little bit of the back of the onion on, it holds it
together. So I'm going to make many slices across a horizontal just mind the
tips of your fingers and then we need to do the same thing vertically. We're just
going to cut along the onion lots of little lines and by doing that when we
slice we get these beautiful little tiny cubes of onion. I've gone for two medium
onions here, I've got my frying pan with about a tablespoon of oil, we're just
going to pop those onions in there and I'm just going to fry these for a few
minutes till they get nice and translucent. Now I'm also going to need a
couple of cloves of garlic, if you cut and just touch down you can
peel the garlic cover off. Now we're just going to crush the garlic, add some rock
salt on to the garlic and then I'm just going to use the edge of my blade to
mash this with the salt. In the meantime my onions have sweated down nicely. I'm
going to take my garlic, pop it in on the back of the spoon, just give that a
little stir through. Now I would like to add in all sorts of Indian spices but I
haven't got them, so I'm going to go with that tikka powder we had, not too much
this time, there's probably going to be a lot of flavor in here already.
I just coat those over, next we've got some ginger and I'm just going to grate
maybe an inch or two of ginger into the mix, nothing smells as gorgeous as fresh
ginger. Next we're going with tomato puree, now you could go with canned
tomatoes, this is a really rich tomato paste. I've used about a cup, maybe a cup
and a half, because tomatoes can be a little sour, I'm going to put a teaspoon
of brown sugar on top of that, half a cup of chicken stock, a little bit of pepper. Now
I've only got white pepper, I would normally use black, you can taste the
sauce now and see if it needs a little extra salt. Now I'm just going to simmer
this away for about 20 minutes to let the sauce and the flavors develop, if you
wanted to, you could add fresh chiles. Now my sauce is almost ready I've got some
fresh coriander here, just going to fold it up and I want to slice it fairly
finely. What I want to do now is make the sauce a little creamier.
I've got quarter of a cup of thick cream and that fresh coriander, give this a
little mix through. Add our chicken tikka back into the sauce, we want to mix this
thoroughly through and bring the whole dish back up to heat. Now I'm going to
serve this chicken tikka masala with some beautiful steamed rice but another
thing that goes really well are these little packs of popadoms that you can
get and I'll show you a little tip on cooking these, really simple and very
quick. They're like a little dry flat pancake and often they're fried, if you
pop them, i'll just put four of them here on... straight on the glass tray in the
microwave oven and I don't know if you can see that but within seconds the
popadoms are going to puff up and within 15 or 20 seconds you'll have
these lovely little hot popadoms, which are beautiful and crisp and taste better
than a pack of Pringles. Now our chicken tikka is warmed up and ready to serve I
think I'm just going to lay it over the top of the rice, get some sauce, make sure
I've got plenty of chicken. I'm just going to break off some coriander and
just sprinkle that over the top. I love the taste of fresh coriander and there
you have it, simple students chicken tikka masala. Now I do hope a lot of my
Indian viewers will forgive this very simplistic version of chicken tikka
masala I know it originated from the UK so it's
not technically an Indian dish but I can tell you this is still going to taste
delicious and for a student it's not too hard to make. Now just come in here let's
get a beautiful chunk of chicken, a little bit of that coriander as well and
of course some of that delicious white rice and here goes... Oh
that is really rich and even though I didn't put fresh chilies in here, this
is really packing quite a heat punch. It's really, really delicious. Let me know
in the comments down below if you've been enjoying this student meal series
we've done while we've had this limited kitchen in Kuala Lumpur, it certainly
produced some really delicious food. So if you enjoy it share the love, share the
video on social media with your friends and I will see you shortly in the next
video. take care