We can always trust Chef Pankaj Bhadouria to have much-needed functional cooking tips up her sleeve. If you love making kebabs at home but struggle with achieving juicy kebabs or the right kind of tenderness, the chef’s new recipe will solve your problems! The former MasterChef winner recently shared a chicken tikka recipe which is simple and doable at home with basic ingredients; however, towards the end of her recipe, she takes some extra precautions to achieve a juicy texture on her kebabs.
“The chicken tikka, along with tandoori chicken, are dishes that have made Indian chicken popular all over the world!” says Chef Bhadouria. “So here is a no oven, no tandoor recipe, yet we can recreate the same charred look texture and the smoky flavour of the Tandoori Chicken Tikka easily at home. Don’t miss out on the special trick shared at the end of the video to get the extra juiciness in the Chicken Tikka!” she added.
Chef Bhadouria used a DIY grill set-up to perfect the charred look on her chicken tikkas. She used a basic grill pan over gas to grill the tikkas and basted the tikkas with butter during this process to keep them from drying out. This is an amazing hack as most tandoori dishes lose their juiciness when they’re getting their char. The butter will keep the chicken tender and will not harden them.
Now for the trick that can give you restaurant-style chicken tikka at home without spending a bomb. After skewering the chicken tikka pieces over a grill, Chef Bhadouria takes these apart from the skewers and puts them back in a pan. She pours two spoons of cream and some butter into the kebabs and stirs them. This technique which involves stirring in the cream and butter with the kebabs helps the tikka retain its creamy tenderness and makes them juicier.