Been making a lot of indian curries recently. It’s been a couole of years since I last made chicken korma and I remember back then the recipe I used was very basic and simple.
This time I spent a lot of time researching the recipe, looking at different variations, regional differences, the history of the dish and while also trying to justify why certain things are done in a scientific way.
Then I tabulated my findings and created one recipe out of all of them. I can’t really claim credit for my recipe nor do I know if my recipe is even authentic. All I know if that is was delicious and the chicken came out insanely tender.
I’ll comment the recipe below.
Solid but maybe pick one or two solid spices for the tadka, and don’t spare anything. I prefer to cook with ghee as the restaurants where I grew up were more Pakistani/Kashmiri style. Actually I don’t think I’ve ever marinated the chicken for a korma as normally you’re cooking it in the sauce rather than separately as in chicken tikka massala, but curious how this changes it.
Yeah for authenticity ghee is probably preferred.
The main reason why I don’t use ghee is because I don’t cook enough indian food to buy it regularly and I didn’t want to commit to an entire jar of it just to make a couple of dishes.
I would say another thing I saw again and again during my research was the insistence of using bone-in chicken. I’m certain it would taste better but I’m too lazy for it 😅
As for the marinading, I would say half the recipes I found marinaded and the other half didn’t. From a food science perspective it made sense to me to marinade the chicken. You could experiment with and without and see if there is a significant difference. I didn’t feel like it was that much more work for me which is why I marinaded.
Bone-in is always more flavourful, but a pain to eat. Boneless easier to eat, never tastes as good. I like to brown the meat in a pan, bone in first then cook in the marinade. My best results are when using a pressure cooker.