Tandoori Meat

[silvercaladan]

About a year ago, I felt an urge to attempt to make my own curries from scratch. So I went out and purchased all the spices, and gave it a whack. Unfortunately, such an endeavor is not to my liking; it took too long and was too complicated. Much easier to buy the pre-made pastes.

Now I'm stuck with all of these spices! Fortunately, a little bit of hunting turned up a delicious, simple recipe with minimal effort: Tandoori Beef

The recipe above from the Whole Foods website is reproduced below with some comments on its implementation.

1 cup yogurt 
2 tablespoons canola oil 
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic 
2 teaspoons finely chopped ginger 
1 teaspoon ground coriander 
1 teaspoon ground cumin 
1/2 to 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper 
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon 
1 teaspoon ground turmeric 
2 teaspoons paprika 
1/2 teaspoon salt 
2 pounds boneless beef steak (such as sirloin) or boneless lamb

Now, I substitute olive oil for canola oil, and used garlic and ginger powders rather than chopped. This is mostly because it is what I already owned, and the point of this recipe was to use up what's sitting around, not buy more things I won't use again. 

I also do not use 2 POUNDS of meat. That's a ridiculous amount of meat. I usually stick with 1lb of whatever beef is on sale and looks thin enough that I can pan-fry it. Usually this comes down to pre-cut stew meat, or any other chunked meat. I've found it tastes delicious on chicken as well, but I'm a beef girl, so.

Anyone know if this recipe would work for tofu?

Mix the yogurt, spices, and oil in a large bowl, and toss in all of your pieces of meat. Coat/submerge all of the meat in the mix, cover the bowl, and toss it in a fridge for two hours or so. 

This sounds like a long time, but it takes literally 5 minutes to make the marinade and coat the meat; all it takes is a bit of forethought to when you want to eat dinner to make this stuff. 


The recipe states that they grill it, but I'm often too lazy to go through the trouble of lighting the coals, so I convert to panfry. One thing you need to be careful about inside is the flash temp of the oil you use! If you're pan-frying in olive oil, make sure you turn the burner on low!! If you're using a wok, use a different oil like safflower or peanut. Now, this isn't like deep-frying where you pour in cups of the stuff; you just want to pour in a bit so that the marinated meat doesn't stick or burn on the pan. Its just like cooking veggies in a pan, except meat. 

Also, you want to be careful to brush off huge globs of the marinade. Its meant to flavor the meat over long soaking, not get crisped into unrecognizable char. So make sure that your meat is relatively clean of the stuff before you toss it in the pan.

The next step is easy: cook the meat until its brown and safe to eat. 

This makes a delicious main dish, and I like to serve it on a bed of fresh spinach. 

Comments

[greenwitch]

If you're trying to get rid of those types of spices, I'd heartily recommend the Red Kidney Bean Curry from Smitten Kitchen. It's delicious, and the most time consuming part is chopping up the ginger, which you won't need to worry about if you're using the dried stuff. (I always use fresh, so I don't know how much the difference in taste would be.)

[silvercaladan]

That looks delicious! I'm a big fan of kidney beans (living in Louisiana) and this looks like a good spin that will help use up some of my excess :)

I'm sure there's a difference in taste from the fresh ginger, but I doubt its irredeemable. Thanks for the recommendation!