Don't Make This Common Mistake With Tandoori Chicken

Tandoori chicken is a delicious treat, isn't it?  As per the Washington Post, the dish was created by Kundan Lal around the 1920s or 1930s. Lal worked as a chef and came up with the dish when he was asked to cook something special that was not heavy as other food options that were available back then. He used a cylindrical oven known as a tandoor to marinate the chicken with a combination of spices, lime, and yogurt. The final dish was better than expected and was a hit, a staple of Indian cooking and Indian restaurants ever since (and rightly so). Over the years, the dish has continued to be popular, with a fan base across cultures around the globe.

When you are working on a tandoori chicken recipe at home, there are a few cardinal rules that you should follow. For example, yogurt and spices are at the heart of the dish — they will make or break it. It's important to marinate the chicken well (via Confessions of A Foodaholic). Though in many ways it's basic, simple (and delicious) cuisine, nevertheless, there's something else that you need to keep in mind while preparing the meal.

Basically, tandoori chicken requires you to cook your meat in an oven at a high temperature. Not choosing to do this and opting for medium temperatures instead, somewhere around 350 degrees Fahrenheit in a bid to keep the meat moist, is bound to have the opposite effect, as explained on the Confessions of A Foodaholic website. You'll find that your meat is dry and simply not the tandoori taste treat you crave. 

Basically, choose high temperatures such as 390 degrees Fahrenheit (or even higher, as Taste Asian Food tells us). The entire baking process in the oven takes about 45 minutes. It's recommended that you add some butter and turn over your meat after baking it for 15 minutes before popping back into the oven for round two. Other recipes recommend home chefs to go as high as 500 degrees Fahrenheit. One cook explained on Reddit how they go about the baking process: "At 500 degrees Fahrenheit for drumsticks, it took me 12 minutes to get the brown color and another few (four to five minutes) for it to finish cooking ... An easy way to check if [the] chicken is fully cooked or not is to poke it with a fork and if the juices run clear, you're good."