Being a Christian has it’s advantages. One of them is being allowed to eat all sorts of food. One of my all time favorite is the Pork Vindaalo, which we rarely cook now-a-days due to health reasons. But a human being is a creature which improvises on the available resources, and such an improvisation has been successfully carried out by a traditional Vasaiker Christian. Pork has been substituted by Chicken, and behold!! Vindaalo continues being prepared and consumed in large quantities.
Without any further delay, here’s the recipe(Any one who wishes to prepare Pork or Lamb Vindaalo, just replace the word chicken in the following recipe with Pork or Lamb. Also, make sure that, there is some amount of pork fat present in the meat.)
Ingredients :
For a family of five heavy eaters(Oh!! It’s my family I am talking about)
1 kg Chicken(with bones, skinned off)
About 50 grams of the specially prepared vindaalo mix :
- Vindaalo mix is prepared by mixing equal quantities of cumin seeds, dry red chilies, turmeric powder, coriander powder.(lightly roast the coriander seeds and cumin seeds to make fine powder)
About 250 ml vinegar,(brown preferably, if not available white will do)
100 ml Cooking Oil(Ground nut, Sunflower, mustard. Do not use coconut oil)
Handful of garlic, Handful of Ginger.
Salt to taste.
Go Ahead, Cook it: (Caution : Do not add any amount of water to any of the ingredients)
- Make a coarse paste of the ginger and garlic. Do not add water while making the paste.
- Put the chicken in a cooking deep bottomed utensil.
- Add all the ingredients to the chicken. Add the ginger garlic paste to it.
- Mix everything well.
- Marinate the mixture for about 3 hours.
- Cook the mixture on medium heat without adding anything else(except salt if it is less). Heat till chicken is cooked properly while stirring intermittently.
- The Vindaalo is ready to be consumed.
This is a dry version of vindaalo which can be had with Dosa, Steam rice, Idli, Neer dosa, Appam, Idiappam, slice bread, naan etc. Do not drain off the oil from the final product. The chicken and the gravy should be kept as much as possible, submerged in the oil, to preserve it for many days. Yes, this delicacy can be consumed even few days after it is prepared. And more the days it is kept, the better will be the taste.(Chicken should be consumed within 2-3 days, else gravy becomes watery.)