Chicken and Tomato Balti

If you like tomatoes, you will love this chicken recipe. It makes a semi-dry Balti and is good served with a lentil dish and plain boiled rice.

That is the opening statement for the recipe "Chicken and Tomato Balti" from a lovely little cookbook I picked up for $5.99 from the bargain bin at Border's Books. The book is called "Indian-Deliciously Authentic Dishes" by Shehzad Husain and Rafi Fernandez. It's a great book, not fancy or pretentious but filled with full color photographs of the dishes and techniques, recipes that are not intimadating or that have so many steps you are chopping and preparing until the middle of next week.There's a small section devoted to explaining some of the more unfamiliar Indian cooking terms, dishes, equipment and spices. I do think that some of the spices might be hard to come by if you're living outside of a metropolitan area, but I think internet mail ordering has helped close that gap in recent years. I've been very happy with the few recipes I've tried, even when they didn't come out as precisly as they looked in the book. ahem

The dish above was delicious, spicy with tomato, cilantro, and cumin as the dominant flavors of the dish, the smell of cilantro so wonderful, so fresh, so green that I soon got over the fact that the dish was a lot more liquid than it should have been. A Balti is a spicy Indian dish, stewed until most of the liquid has evaporated, and served in a pot that doesn't look all that different from a wok. Well, I didn't have a Balti, I almost bought one, but then decided to wait because the store I was in only had stainless steel ones and I wanted a cast iron one. I can't say that not having the Balti made any difference with this dish coming out liquidier than it should have. I used a pretty heavy duty stock pot, I just think the fault lies with me and my impatience to let the liquid really boil down. Ah well, it was delicious anyway and I served it with a lentil dish and boiled rice, just like the authors suggested.

Chicken and Tomato Balti

from the cookbook "Indian-Deliciously Authentic Dishes" by Shehzad Husain and Rafi Fernandez

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4 tbsp corn oil
• 6 curry leaves*
• 1/2 teaspoon mixed onion and mustard seeds**
• 8 medium tomatoes, sliced
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp chili powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp garlic pulp
• 11/2 lbs chicken, skinned, boned and cubed
• 2/3 cup water
• 1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh coriander (cilantro)

*I could only get dried curry leaves, but it was fine. **I couldn't find onion seeds, so I used dried chopped onion.

Heat the oil in a deep round-bottomed frying pan (skillet) or a medium Karahi. Add the curry leaves and mixed onion and mustard seeds and stir well. Lower the heat slightly and add the tomatoes. While the tomatoes are gently cooking, mix together the ground coriander, chili powder, salt, ground cumin and garlic in a bowl. Tip the spices onto the tomatoes. Add the chicken pieces and stir together well. Stir-fry for about 5 minutes. Pour on the water and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens and the chicken is cooked through. Sprinkle the sesame seeds and fresh coriander (cilantro) over the top of the dish and serve.

Written by Deb on August 6, 2003 11:14 AM