Chicken Karahi at Home: The Original Recipe With a Tomato-and-Ginger Base and No Onion
There is rarely an argument in Pakistan about eating chicken karahi. The argument is about how to cook it, and the original answer is refreshingly plain: a proper karahi has no onion base. Tomatoes, ginger, garlic and black pepper — those four build the flavour. What it needs is a fierce flame, a wide open karahi and thirty to forty minutes of your attention.
Ingredients
One kilo of chicken in small pieces, half a cup of oil or ghee, six to seven large tomatoes halved, two tablespoons of ginger-garlic paste, one tablespoon of coriander seeds roughly crushed, one tablespoon of roasted cumin, one and a half teaspoons of freshly crushed black pepper, one teaspoon of red chilli, salt to taste, and five or six green chillies slit down the middle. To finish: julienned ginger and fresh coriander.
Method
Heat the karahi until it is properly hot, add the oil and sear the chicken on high heat until the pieces turn golden and their own water dries off. Add the ginger-garlic paste and fry two minutes, then lay the halved tomatoes on top, cover and drop the heat to medium. In eight to ten minutes the tomatoes will slump; lift their skins off with tongs and crush the flesh with a spoon into a sauce. Now add the salt, red chilli, crushed coriander and cumin, and fry hard on high heat until the oil separates at the edges. Add the black pepper last of all, so its aroma survives. Scatter in the green chillies, cover for two minutes, and the karahi is done. Never add water; the tomato juice is the gravy.
Serving it properly
Bring the karahi to the table in the same vessel it cooked in, with ginger and coriander scattered over the top. Hot naan or roghni naan on the side, and a raw onion salad with lemon, completes it. One tried-and-tested note: with free-range desi chicken the cooking takes a little longer, but the flavour beats most restaurant versions.
