“Posto-Chicken” – Chicken cooked with poppy seeds

We have talked about oil-free cooking or cooking in less oil before on this blog. It’s generally seen that we rarely observe this religiously in our daily lives. Choice and consumption of oily food deteriorates our health very much, during our busy schedules. With the ever-growing number of diseases it is a sacrilegious to even think of our daily staple made of fried / oily stuff. As a result, we need to consciously avoid the oil-rich junk-food, to cut calories and keep cholesterol under check.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve to eat only boiled-food and can’t munch on our favorite chicken and mutton recipes. With careful choice and innovations, we can still enjoy our chicken or mutton with very little oil! This single-most factor inspired me to take an initiative to cook my first-ever home-made chicken dish – with just 2 tea-spoons of oil!

I wanted to give the dish an all-new innovative taste, by adding poppy-seeds – popularly known as “Posto” in Bengal – while making sure that the measure of oil is almost ‘nil’. This recipe is my ingenious version of “Posto-Chicken”, especially since I did not use ginger; but trust me it doesn’t compromise on the taste of this preparation.

Posto Chicken (c)saastastebuds

Ingredients for preparing “Posto-Chicken” or Chicken with Poppy seeds”

1. 2 TBLSP mustard oil
2. 2 large onions, finely chopped
3. 1 piece capsicum – finely chopped
4. 1 clove garlic
5. 25 gms Posto (poppy seeds)
6. 1/4 cup water
7. 800gms chicken (+/- 200gms if required)
8. 2 pc cardamom, cloves and 1 small piece cinnamon
9. 1/4 tsp turmeric powder
10. 4 medium pieces green chillies
11. 1 TSP chilli powder
12. Salt as per taste
13. 25gms butter
14. 100gms curd (non-sweetened – preferably fat-free)

Preparation:

• Marinate chicken with turmeric, chilli powder and a little salt and keep aside in a cool place.
• Grind the poppy seeds and garlic together in a grinder and keep aside.
• Now heat 1 TSP oil in a ‘kadai’/ wok in low-flame for 2 minutes.
• Add the cardamom, cloves & the single piece of cinnamon to the oil and sauté for 3 minutes till you get the beautiful appetizing aroma from it.
• Fry onions & chopped capsicum until golden brown.
• Now add the marinated chicken, 1TSP oil, the garlic and poppy-seeds paste and sauté for 2 minutes.
• Add the curd to it and stir well till it forms nice thick gravy.
• Add a little water and keep the kadai / wok covered for some time, to get the taste and aroma of slow, covered cooking. It will keep the juice of the chicken and boil it properly too.
• Add the butter when the curry is dry to develop the rich aroma of butter, and stir very lightly, to evenly mix, while not breaking the chicken pieces
• Once you get the rich essence of the “posto” and the butter, empty the wok carefully into a large bowl, making sure none of the chicken pieces are broken / mutilated
• Garnish with the green chillies and bit of curd.

Your “posto chicken” is now ready to serve. It’s best enjoyed with “Tandoori-Roti” – i.e. oven fresh hand-made flat-bread.

“Posto” or poppy seeds are mainly used for vegetarian preparations – hence my preparation experience was quite different. This favored Bengali ingredient not only adds a unique flavor to your chicken, but the aromatic taste of capsicum and green chillies, makes the chicken taste quite different from your everyday chicken dishes.

Once this recipe was given its test run at my home the “posto-chicken” has become the most important Indian recipe across all my extended family members. This beautiful recipe with a touch of Bengal was next shared with a few of my friends too, and gave the same “different” and “unique” kind of responses from them.

So try this out and leave your experiences in the comments section below. If you keep on experimenting like me, you’d be able to come up with more different recipes in due course of time.

Stay tuned to this page for more recipes from my hobby kitchen!

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5 Ways to Retain Taste Flavor and Aroma

Cooking is considered by many chefs and gourmets as a creative art! Retaining the perfect aroma in recipes, while enhancing flavor and taste, differentiates a finer chef from the rest. It may sound easy, but a majority of the aspiring chefs take a long time to understand this, while many others fail to make sustained efforts to capture this finer nuance of cooking.

Thankfully, the traditional cooking methods practiced by our mothers and grannies, are good enough to start on this journey of mastering this fine art of great cooking. For example, I learned from my mother that one of the most important aspects of keeping the flavor (as well as essential nutrients), is to master the art of covered cooking.

The 5 great ways to retain flavor, aroma and taste in cooking are: Slow Cooking, Covered Cooking, Sautéing, Deep frying and Half-Boiling.

Low Flame cooking

Covered Cooking

Slow cooking – Cooking vegetables and meat in low flame retains their maximum benefits and better taste. It’s true that it takes more time to cook the food, but it always enriches the aroma, taste and flavor of the recipe. It allows you to use the ingredients in measured quantities, in time, which produces the best results by augmenting the richer taste in your cooked food. When you cook on a low flame, the food doesn’t get burnt and doesn’t necessitate nurturing much.

Covered Cooking – Covered cooking retains moisture in your primary ingredients, which in turn retains the original taste and flavor. While cooking, when you cover the pan, it also uses lesser oil and retains softness, so that the items are juiciest to relish. This method also adds a better dimension to your cooking.

The best part of slow and covered cooking is that when the food is getting cooked you can engage yourself in some other work and let your food cook gently without tending.

Sauteing

Sautéing is another cooking method, in which very less amount of oil is used to cook – although at relatively high temperatures. This method allows the food to cook very quickly in the sauté pan. Sautéing yields best result when clarified butter is used instead of regular cooking oil. The clarified butter is usually kept at room temperatures for about 30 minutes before the process of sautéing. This type of sautéing allows the food to retain flavor and aroma, while adding a unique taste of clarified butter.

Sautéing can also be done with little or no oil, which is very healthy especially when you need to keep your calorie counts to minimum. When doing “no-oil sautéing” the best practice is to use low-medium stock, broth or even soya-sauce on a flatter frying pan. The vegetables also need to be sliced in smaller sizes and kept in room temperature for sometime before cooking; this practice allows the chopped vegetables turn golden brown quickly too.

Sautéing requires a larger space to cook, so always make sure of using a large pan for sautéing. When the pan gets hot allow the butter solid to take its liquid form in the pan before starting the sautéing process.

Deep Frying

Deep frying is a faster cooking method where you submerge the food in hot oil. You won’t require water to cook your food when you are using this cooking practice. If executed properly in an optimum flame, deep-frying doesn’t make your food extremely fatty, since the moisture in the food deters the oil. It’s however important to know how fast you should keep the food in oil before you take it out. Let your hands do the talking with this method, especially while cooking your favorite crispies at home.

Half-Boiling

Deep frying gives a different and richer aroma, flavor and taste to the items cooked. Many of the Indian cuisine have their signature rich taste and aroma, thanks to waterless and deep-frying.

Half-Boiling is another faster way of cooking, which retains the original flavor and taste of vegetables. This process of cooking also retains the nutritional value to the maximum! To get the best nutritional value and flavor out of half-boiled cooking, the vegetables need to be cut in bigger slices – or better still, “knifeless slicing” or hand-broken into pieces, as practiced traditionally. Larger sizes also retain the vitamin content.

So these are the 5 distinct ways to get retain flavor aroma and taste in cooking at home. With the ever-increasing rise in various diseases especially diabetes and high cholesterol the food doesn’t need to be tasteless at all!

Watch this space for more such ideas in the future.

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