Palak Chicken Recipe

I personally think that curries shouldn’t be too spicy, if they are then you tend to lose the flavour and just taste spiciness. I tend to stick with a Balti as they have a little spice but are jam packed full of flavour.

I do not tend to make many curries but have started to venture out of my comfort zone and start making a few different curries. I came across this Palak Chicken Recipe when going through Beyond Brilliant by Dipna Asand, you can read my review of this book by clicking here

Palak Chicken is a chicken curry dish from Punjabi and is made from a spinach masala sauce, perfect if you like the taste of spinach which I love.

The recipe requires you to make you own masala sauce using green finger chillies, you could just buy the sauce but I personally think you get more flavour by making it and its not very complicated at all! You just need to be careful of how many green chillies you used, I made it a second time and put too many in and believe me it was hot!!

Read my full review of Dipna’s book Beyond Brilliant

The first thing I did was put some oil on the heat and once hot drop in a teaspoon worth of coming seeds and allow these to coat in oil for a minute or two. I then put the onion in to sweat, depending on how high you have the heat would determine how long it takes. You don’t want it to be so hot that the onions burn but become a nicely caramelised.

Garlic to me is a thing of beauty, I could have it in almost any dish. So to be like any good curry this one needs a good amount of garlic paste added to it, along with the crushed green finger chilies. Palak chicken is a tomato based curry so once the garlic and green chilies are well mixed we want to add in the plum tomatoes and allow to coo for a few minutes until everything is well combined.

Interestingly you then need to take it off the heat and use a hand blender to ensure all the onion and tomatoes are blended up. The mixture becomes thicker and even changes to a orange colour, believe me the smell coming from it is intense and amazing!

Once back on heat you then add in all the additional spices minus the garam masala and allow it to cook for a good 12-20 minutes. Now its time to add in the yummy spinach and cook for another 10 minutes to allow the spinach to whittle down, by now I was smelling it and it was really making me hungry….I couldn’t wait to get a taste of it.

Once its thickened up you then want to add the chopped chicken to the dish, you could use other meats such as lamp – I do think it would be just as nice, chicken however works incredibly well. Continue allowing the meat to cook until its fully cooked. When your ready to serve add in some coriander and garam masala and mix it all up.

I severed the Palak chicken with a nice mound of rice and sprinkled a little coriander over them..trust me it was amazing!

As this curry is tomato based its not very high in calories so it could be eaten when following a low calorie, controlled diet. I do some Slimming World meals so left the butter out, you could even sweat the onions with fry light instead of oil.

Palak Chicken Recipe

The ingredients below does say it would serve 4-5 people, if you are just having this curry and rice then id say that its more suitable for 2. If however your mixing it with Naan, other dishes then perhaps you would have less so it would be suitable for more people.

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