Dal with Chicken

Friday night is curry night in our house (unless we're out, in which case Saturday night is curry night instead). I'd bought chicken breasts at lunchtime, on the grounds that we're having lamb shanks on Sunday so it would be better not to have lamb tonight as well; originally I'd been intending to make chicken dopyaza, but then I thought that perhaps this would be a good opportunity to try something new.

I eventually settled on the mung dal with chicken in the Ultimate Curry Bible, although as we only had whole mung beans and the recipe called for split I substituted channa dal.

The cooking technique was slightly different to those I'd come across before; instead of frying the spices and tomatoes together, a few ingredients are added at a time; first ginger and garlic, then turmeric, cayenne and salt, then tomatoes, and finally cumin seed, garam masala and green chilli. Each addition is fried briefly, then you add a little hot water and cook until reduced before adding the next set of ingredients. Then you brown the chicken in the spicy paste before adding the pre-cooked dal and water and simmering slowly (the recipe said 25 minutes, but it probably ended up being more like an hour, which is never a bad thing with curries).

When I tasted the sauce just after setting it to simmer I thought this was going to be a disaster; it contained half a teaspoon of cayenne and a couple of slivers of a green chill. The current batch of chillies seems to be particularly potent and at that point the sauce was so hot as to be practically inedible to our palates. Fortunately, the long slow cooking allowed the flavours to blend and soften, and it was actually very nice, richly and complexly flavoured. We both thought it was definitely one to make again.