Garam Masala Tuesdays: Pepper Chicken Chettinad

I generally cook north indian food (mainly with a Punjabi touch) at home but absolutely love south Indian food.

Northern cuisine has been greatly influenced by the Mughals with the rich butter laden curries, but it is in the cuisine of the south that you can see the use of the spices that India is famous for. Probably because it is in the south that these spices are actually grown.

South Indian cuisine is quite different from the cooking of Northern India. The cuisine of the Southern Indian states – Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh on the east coat, Karnataka and Kerala on the west coast – use such old cooking techniques that are still widely practiced, with contemporary refinements, today.

I have previously shared my love for the food of Kerala.

Another popular cuisine from the south is the Chettinad cuisine- the food native to the Chettinad region of Tamil Nadu state in South India comprising of Madurai, Tirunelveli and Karaikudi regions. For centuries Chettiars, a caste of traders have lived there and cooked up dishes that are hot and scream pungent with fresh ground masalas. Chettinad cuisine is surprisingly meat-centric (excluding beef and pork, for religious reasons) considering its origins in vegetarian-dominated southern India.

This cuisine is well known for its hot and spicy, aromatic non vegetarian dishes like Chicken Chettinad, Pepper Chicken, Fish Varuval etc.

Today, on GMT I will be sharing the Chettinad region’s Milagu Kozhi Chettinad or Pepper Chicken chettinad- a pepper spiced chicken dish. Do remember, it was south India that exported black pepper to the world.

Pepper has been used as a spice in India since it was introduced by South East Asia people in prehistory. Pepper is native to South East Asia and has been known to Indian cooking since at least 2 BC! (source: wikipedia)

Peppercorns were a much-prized trade good, often referred to as “black gold” and used as a form of commodity money. Of course now they are gold to dishes like the one I am sharing today!

Black pepper, either powdered or whole, is also widely used in traditional Indian medicine and as a home remedy for relief from sore throat, throat congestion, cough etc.

You should know that once ground, pepper’s aromatics evaporate quickly; and that is why it is imperative to the success of a dish that you freshly ground the whole peppercorns. And since pepper plays such an important part in this dish, definitely use freshly ground pepper. You can either grind your peppercorns using a pepper mill grinder or pound it with a mortar pestle or you could even use a spice grinder.

Besides using freshly ground pepper for this dish, I highly recommend using homemade garam masala to spice up the dish (hopefully soon I should be doing a post on that too).

If you are not using fresh homemade garam masala, I would suggest dry roasting 1 1-inch cinnamon sticks, 3 green cardamom, 3 cloves, 2 bay leaves and 1 tsp of fennel seeds and then grinding all to a fine powder. The garam masala recipe I use has a few more spices in it but for this dish these whole spices should suffice. If you have to, use store bought garam masala but honestly the flavors would differ.
PEPPER CHICKEN CHETTINAD