What You Are Making
The smell reaches you before the plate does. Smoke curls off a bank of skewers, fat drips and flares, and the yogurt coating on each cube of chicken has dried, darkened and blistered into small black freckles. That is chicken tikka done properly. Boneless chicken is cut into bite-sized chunks, marinated in two stages, and cooked over intense heat so the outside chars while the inside stays moist. For many people outside India, this was the first taste of tandoori cooking, and it is one of the few restaurant dishes that moves easily into a home kitchen. A clay tandoor is not required. What matters is a decent marinade and strong heat coming from above or below. The two-stage marinade is worth the effort. The first, a thin rub of ginger, garlic, lemon and salt, seasons the meat from within. The second, a thick yogurt and spice coat, is what sticks, darkens and chars once the skewers meet the fire. Using only one marinade is the main reason home versions taste flat next to a good roadside or restaurant tikka.
The Dish’s Backstory
Anyone who names a single inventor for chicken tikka is guessing, so the honest answer is that its birthplace is argued over. The clay tandoor, and the practice of steeping meat in spiced yogurt before cooking it quickly in fierce heat, are recorded in the Northwest Frontier, the country around present-day Peshawar in Pakistan. Punjabi refugee cooks then carried tandoori cooking into Delhi and Punjab after Partition in 1947, and Moti Mahal in Delhi is the restaurant most often named in that story. Historians such as Colleen Taylor Sen and Lizzie Collingham both place tandoori chicken and chicken tikka on this Punjab-to-Peshawar continuum, with no single inventor or city. The dish as it is eaten in Delhi and Punjab today is best understood as a Northwest Frontier tradition that was reworked and made popular after 1947, not an entirely separate Indian creation. Chicken tikka masala, the saucy dish made from grilled tikka pieces, has a different and equally contested history centred on South Asian restaurants in Britain. It is not the dish described here.
At the Stove, Step by Step
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Prep
Rub on the first marinade
Put the diced thigh in a bowl with the ginger-garlic paste, lemon and salt, and turn it until nothing is left uncoated. Cover it and refrigerate while you assemble the yogurt mixture, for 20 minutes at least. Being thin, this first layer sinks into the meat and seasons it deep down, which a thick yogurt blanket cannot do by itself.
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Prep
Mix and add the second marinade
In a separate bowl, whisk the yogurt smooth and add the chilli powder, garam masala, cumin, coriander, turmeric, crumbled kasuri methi, the oil and salt. Scrape it over the chicken and use your hands to work it into every crevice. The oil here earns its place: it holds the spices to the meat and lets them blacken in the heat, whereas a dry coating cracks and drops off.
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Prep
Chill it for hours
Put a lid or wrap over the bowl and set it in the refrigerator for 4 hours at the very least. An overnight stay, up to 24 hours, rewards you with more flavour and a softer bite. The refrigerator is the only safe place for this step. Raw chicken on the counter sits in the warm zone where bacteria multiply quickest, and no amount of spice or lemon in the bowl cancels that out.
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Prep
Thread onto skewers
Slide the marinated pieces onto your skewers with a finger's width between each, so the fire can touch the sides of every cube instead of only the top and bottom. Wooden or bamboo sticks need a 30 minute soak in water first, or their exposed tips burn black and snap during cooking.
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Cook
Sear hard over direct heat
Let your grill, pan or broiler heat up fully before any chicken touches it. Tikka rewards speed and fierce temperature. Place the skewers on and do not fiddle with them for 3 to 4 minutes per side, waiting for real black spots at the edges rather than simple browning. In an ordinary oven, switch the broiler to its top setting and set the rack near the heating element to get a similar effect.
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Cook
Brush and finish cooking
Keep rotating the skewers, brushing a little melted butter or oil over them at each turn. Roughly 12 to 15 minutes in total, depending on your fire, should leave the pieces patchily blackened on all faces and cooked through. Test by sliding a thermometer into the thickest cube: 74°C (165°F) is the minimum. Thigh meat remains juicy at that temperature in a way breast does not, which explains the choice of cut.
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Serve
Rest, dress and serve
Let the skewers sit for 2 to 3 minutes off the heat, then slide the chicken off. Dust with chaat masala, squeeze lemon over it, and bring it to the table at once with the vinegared onions. The char softens as the chicken cools, so tikka is best served straight from the fire and not left waiting.
Stand-ins If You Are Short
Chicken breast can replace thigh, but at tandoor-style heat it dries out more quickly, so take it off a couple of minutes sooner and check the temperature more often. Greek yogurt can be used in place of ordinary thick yogurt with no other change. Where Kashmiri chilli powder is not on the shelf, use half as much of a hotter chilli powder with a little paprika for colour, as Kashmiri chilli is prized mostly for its deep red and mild heat. A charcoal grill gives the smokiest result, but a very hot cast-iron grill pan indoors, finished under a hot broiler, comes close when outdoor grilling is not possible.
Dial the Chilli Up or Down
Heat lives in the chilli of the second marinade. You can move it up or down as you wish and the char will not suffer, since blackening depends on strong heat and on the sugars in the yogurt more than on chilli. A mild tikka uses Kashmiri chilli powder alone and nothing hotter. A fiery one adds a teaspoon of ground hot chilli or a pinch of cayenne to the Kashmiri, so the red colour stays and the burn grows. When you have overshot, extra chaat masala sprinkled over the cooked chicken sharpens the taste without adding any more heat.
Where It Goes Wrong
Rushing the marinade is the first trap. A half hour leaves the spices sitting on the surface, and what comes off the fire tastes like ordinary spiced chicken instead of tikka. Give it 4 hours as a floor, and overnight if the schedule allows. Next is cooking over heat that is not strong enough, which gives you grey, boiled-looking meat in place of char; tikka needs high direct heat applied quickly, not gentle cooking over a long time. Third is leaving the oil out of the marinade, which lets the spice coating dry up and fall off on the grill instead of forming a cohesive crust. Finally, uneven cubes mean some pieces are overcooked and dry by the time the biggest ones reach a safe temperature, so aim for even 1.5-inch cubes.
Leftovers, Kept and Revived
Keeping: Raw chicken in its marinade can be left covered in the refrigerator for a day at most. After 24 hours the lemon and yogurt acids start to make the meat stringy. After cooking, tikka keeps for up to 3 days in a sealed container in the refrigerator. Freezing cooked tikka is possible for about 2 months, but the char and the bite suffer after thawing, so it is a last resort.
Reviving: A hot dry skillet, or a place under the broiler, for a few minutes on each side wins back some of the blackened edges, while a microwave makes the chicken rubbery and takes away the smokiness. If convenience pushes you to the microwave anyway, cover the plate loosely and work in short bursts, then slide it under the broiler for a minute to firm the outside. Either way, the chicken must be steaming hot throughout when it reaches the table.
Handle This Part Carefully
Handling raw poultry takes more than the usual tidiness. Marinate only in the refrigerator, even if you plan to be quick. Use one cutting board and knife for the raw meat alone, then scrub your hands, tools and every surface the chicken or marinade came near with hot soapy water before anything else touches them. The leftover marinade must not become a sauce or drizzle unless it first boils vigorously for a full minute, as it has been sitting on raw chicken all along. Aim for 74°C (165°F) or more at the middle of your largest piece, confirmed with a thermometer and not by how the meat looks, and put what remains in the refrigerator within two hours.
Worth Opening Next
- Colleen Taylor Sen, "Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India" (Reaktion Books) — on the Northwest Frontier origins of tandoori cooking and its spread into Punjab and Delhi after 1947.
- Lizzie Collingham, "Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors" (Oxford University Press) — on the Peshawar-to-Delhi history of the tandoor and the restaurants that popularized tandoori chicken and tikka.