- recipes -

The preparation of Chicken Malai begins with garam masala, a blend of several aromatic spices essential to most Northern Indian cuisine. The most interesting aspect of garam masala is that no single recipe for this spice combination exists, since each cook has a his or her own blend. Our Executive Chef shares his recipe for a Mughal garam masala, a mellow blend accented with cardamom that originated in the courts and palaces of the Moghul emperors of Northern India. Mughal garam is often used in cream - and yogurt-based dishes, such as this Chicken Malai Kabob.

Yogurt is as important as the spices in Indian cuisine. It's used as a meat tenderizer and flavor enhancer. The yogurt used in India is made with buffalo's milk, which has a fuller fat content and creamier consistency than most commercial cow's-milk yogurts can be used interchangeably in the marinade to give this dish a more authentic consistency and taste.

In America it's called a pancake, in France a crepe, in Spain a tortilla, but in India it's a dosa. Dosa is made not with wheat flour but a mixture of ground rice and urad dal. Though usually considered a lentil. urad dal is actually the hulled and split seed of the black gram bean. Dosa is flavored with fenugreek, also known as methi. Like urad dal, fenugreek, is a bean, but because of its pungent aroma and bitter taste, it is used as a spice. Though dosa does bear a family resemblance to its Western cousins, it tends to be much larger--a sixteen-inch diameter is the norm--which makes this a good dish for sharing.

Like crepe and tortillas, dosas are used as shells for various fillings such as a spiced mixture of green peas and potatoes known as masala dosa. The pancake is folded around the filling to create a long rectangle or a squat triangle. Jose Pulloppilly prefers to make his dosas into rectangles.

All of our restaurants bake its delicious breads like onion khulcha in a tandoor, a traditional rounded-top oven made of brick and clay. Foods and breads are baked over the direct heat of a smoky fire inside the tandoor. The chef stretches the dough until it's flat and then sticks it to the sides of the oven with specially designed metal skewers. Since you probably don't have a tandoor oven at home, you can replicate the effect by baking onion khulcha and other Indian breads in a conventional oven on a pizza stone or quarry tiles. Though onion khulcha rises, the dough does not contain yeast. The natural bacteria in the yogurt activates the fermentation process and gives a pleasant tart flavor to the bread.