Ratings - Ease: 2/5, Taste: 4.5/5, Price: $

Scale: Ease out of 5, with 5 being easy and 1 difficult. Taste out of 5, 5 being delicious and 1 being disgusting. Price out of 5 dollar ($) signs, $ being cheap and $$$ being expensive.

Link to the video recipe:

Last week, I had the strange idea to make Tandoori Chicken instead of the traditional buffalo wings or for the Super Bowl. Long story short, it was a great success. The chicken tasted pretty indistinguishable from the kind you get at Indian restaurants in the US, which was my only standard, so I was more than pleased.

I made a few tweaks to the recipe, but none of them made too much of a difference. The most important was that I scaled up the recipe from 750g of bone-in chicken legs to 3000g, and I used thighs only. A slight issue I had was not having Kashmiri chili powder, which really helps the chicken get its signature red color, and has a distinctive flavor of its own. I was able to get some red pigmentation with food coloring, but the final product ended up looking more orange than red. The generic chili powder's flavor wasn't entirely the same as the Kashmiri version, but the difference isn't too blaring, so I wouldn't say not having Kashmiri chili powder is a deal-breaker for this dish. The last change I made was broiling the chicken at the end (a feature in my oven and, I believe, most American home ovens), which really helped me get the spotty, charred surface I was trying to recreate.

The cooking of the Tandoori chicken itself is absurdly easy, you just put it in the oven and take it out when it's done. The preparation, on the other hand, is pretty time-consuming. At my supermarket, if you want to buy bone-in chicken, it pretty much always comes with the skin, so I had to remove skin from a dozen or so large chicken thighs. I'm a bit of a germaphobe when it comes to raw chicken, so I spent quite a while cleaning that up. The two marination periods seemed a little unnecessary, as did having to hang my own yogurt (you can't buy hung curd near me) but the chicken turned out nice, so I can't question the method.

This is a very easy recipe to scale up and make a large quantity of, so I'd definitely recommend making a lot of tandoori chicken, either for a social gathering or to keep as leftovers (which makes for great Chicken Tikka Masala). Two thumbs up from me.