Amma special thengakothu chicken peralan

This is my first blog post here and I wanted it to be something Amma cooked for us through the years. As I have mentioned earlier on the ‘About Me’ section of the blog, Amma has been a great home chef through the years and she is a big inspiration for me when it comes to cooking. Looking forward to sharing some of her recipes here on this blog feed.

When we were in Kuwait during a short stint, we had the privilege of coming back home daily from school to Amma’s awesome dishes for lunch (not that she doesn’t cook at all back in Kerala but since she was working in Kerala our culinary tastebuds weren’t pampered as much at lunch time). I remember this dish as one of my most favourite items in the lunch menu – Chicken Peralan. She used to prepare this almost weekly once atleast and later I have realized that this has become one of my favorites and I too end up preparing this quite frequently now.

Chicken Peralan is a form of spicy chicken dry roast. ‘Peralan’ means coated and therefore it means the chicken pieces are coated with the masala prepared with spice powders, curry leaves, bite sized coconut pieces and dry roasted without adding water to it. The coconut chunks and curry leaves gives it a nice flavour and the chicken pieces are thus slow cooked in it for a while. The essence of getting a nice dry masala to coat it lies in the way the onions are sautéed well till its dark brown on medium heat and also by not adding water at all which would change its consistency otherwise.

This pairs up so well with spiced buttermilk (Kachiyamoru) and boiled white rice and also with Kerala Porotta. So let’s get to the recipe.

RECIPE

Ingredients :-

Chicken – 1 kg

Onion – 3 medium

Ginger garlic paste – 1.5 tbsp

Chilli powder – 1 tbsp

Turmeric powder – 1/2 tsp

Chicken masala (I use Eastern Chicken Masala)- 2 tbsp

Crushed Black Pepper powder – 2 tsp

Salt – to taste

Curry leaves – a few

Sliced Coconut pieces – 15-20 pieces

Coconut oil – 3 tbsp

Method :-

1. Cut chicken into small sized pieces. (I have taken boneless chicken thigh pieces here but you may take chicken with bone too but its good to cut into small pieces so that it coats well)

2.Marinate chicken with chilli powder, turmeric powder and salt for half an hour

3.Heat a pan and add coconut oil when hot. To this add sliced coconut pieces, curry leaves and sauté for a while.

4.Now add sliced onion and sauté till it’s golden brown.

5.Later add ginger garlic paste and sauté

6.Now add the marinated chicken pieces to this and chicken masala powder and salt

7.Now cover and cook on medium flame till chicken is half done.

8.Then open and cook on high flame till all the water evaporates.

9.Once the dish is dry, put on medium flame and keep cooking after adding pepper powder to it.

10. Keep sautéing on medium flame till the chicken pieces are soft and it becomes darker in colour.

Serve hot with rice/roti/Porotta.

Hope you all enjoy the dish.