Samar Halarnkar: An air-fried tandoori chicken for the new India

I first encountered tandoori chicken in the summer of 1976, one of the few pleasant discoveries amid the culture shock of New Delhi. The move from the quiet, cool town of Belgaum in north-west Karnataka to heaving, brash, boiling Delhi remains an unpleasant memory.

When school began, I hated the bus ride home. The boys on the bus laughed at my Hindi because it was Dakhni, which may share common roots but was different enough to be mocked. I was whacked frequently on the back of my head to uproarious laughter. Delhi was not for the sensitive. I endured by keeping my head down and suppressing my distress.

The weekends came as relief. We delighted in the great, lush sprawls of Nehru, Lodhi and Buddha Jayanti parks, and India Gate, and in Sunday lunches in the outer circle of Connaught Place. The summers were not pleasant, but the pollution was a fraction of what it is now, and it all seemed reasonably tolerable for someone who had grown up in the steaming heart of the Deccan.

We got to hear of Kake Da Dhaba, supposedly an iconic representation of hearty Punjabi food and the dhaba culture itself. It was certainly all of that. My parents were horrified when we sat at the rooftop tables—now an air-conditioned room, if I recall—watching waiters sweep leftover bones on to the floor.

Before reaching the rooftop, you passed the cramped open kitchen, where sweat-soaked cooks in fraying banians (vests) tended the fires. Now and then, they gathered sweat from their foreheads with a forefinger and flicked it aside. Drops—or rivulets—splashed into the open vats, perhaps lending butter chicken and other gravies their distinctive taste.

Fortunately, gravy items, so to speak, were not what we sought. We came for the tandoori chicken. The first time I ate a “leg piece”, I was sold on the slightly charred, flame-red, tender chicken. No one really cared about artificial colours those days, so I have no idea how it achieved its colour. Suffice it to say that Kade Da Dhaba’s tandoori chicken with tandoori roti or naan became the family’s singular Sunday delight. In those pre-cholesterol days, it did not matter that the bird was basted liberally with oodles of ghee or butter.

It does not appear like that now, but tandoori chicken was an exotic addition to our lives, so different from the paya, bheja and biryani we ate in north Karnataka. My mother even bought a stovetop tandoor, which looked like a cousin of the pressure cooker, and turned out reasonably realistic tandoori chicken.

Today, life has turned: trotters and brain suddenly seem exotic, and tandoori chicken is relegated to the status of, well, chicken. Once we left Delhi, tandoori chicken faded from our kitchen, but the memories remained for some years, enough to try out southern—and wholly unsatisfying—interpretations. Who could match Kade Da Dhaba south of the Vindhyas?

Since chicken is among the least harmful meats these days, and because I struggle to create enough variations to satisfy my teenager’s endless demands for culinary novelty, I recently realised that she did not really know the joys of tandoori chicken. Lately, I have begun making it for her at home, though it is not quite the tandoori chicken I remember from the summer of 1976.

I do not cook it in a tandoor—the clay oven known since Harappan times—but in an air fryer. Nor do I know what marinade Kundan Lal Gujral used when he popularised the dish in Old Delhi after 1947, where the chicken acquired its distinctive colour at his original Moti Mahal restaurant. My version uses little more than Kashmiri chilli powder, though I do keep to the Mughal habit of infusing yogurt into the marinade.

Tandoori chicken became so emblematic of the new republic that Jawaharlal Nehru ensured it was often served at official banquets. In the New India, however, foreign guests must make do with strictly vegetarian fare: jackfruit skewers and Udipi brinjal sukka, served to emphasise maritime ties (yes, without fish), for the President of Seychelles last month and zaffrani or saffron-infused paneer rolls with aachari baingan or tangy eggplant for Vladimir Putin in December 2025.

My simple offering to the legacy of tandoori chicken responds, in its modest way, to the diabetic and cardiovascular epidemics sweeping the land and tries to find a way into at least some crannies of the new India. It uses virtually no oil and certainly no butter or ghee. The trick is to manipulate the air fryer’s temperature controls to achieve the right balance of char and tenderness. It is no tandoor, of course, but it produces a quick and fair imitation of the original—without the smoke and the sweat.

AIR-FRIED TANDOORI CHICKEN

Serves 2

Ingredients

500g chicken full legs, cut into two or three pieces
3 tsp Kashmiri mirch
2 tsp ginger-garlic paste
1 tbsp yogurt
Juice of half a lime
1 tsp oil
Salt to taste

Method

Marinate the chicken with all the ingredients and oil for at least two hours (longer if possible).

Line the air-fryer basket with lightly greased foil and place the chicken pieces on it. Cook at 150 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. Turn the chicken over, increase the temperature to 180 degrees, and cook for 15 minutes, turning once after 10 minutes.

Cook for another 10 minutes at 180 degrees, turning again midway if needed, until the chicken is well browned and cooked through.

If you want it closer to tandoor-style (slightly charred edges), you can air-fry at 200 degrees for 3-5 minutes at the end.

Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar (@samar11) is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.