If you’re looking for the perfect appetiser to start your meal off right, how about some Ushna Delight? Executive Chef Amrish Sood of Ushna Restaurant provided this dish to help get things going. He says, “This is an Indian style of a cold cut of chicken – perfect to start with and to stimulate your appetite for the evening.”
Ingredients:
- One chicken breast
- 40g fresh coriander
- 20g fresh ginger
- 15g red capsicum
- 15g green capsicum
- 2g turmeric powder
- 10g ginger and garlic paste
- 10ml lemon juice
- 15g labneh and 40ml cream
- 2g green cardamom powder
- 2g white pepper powder
- 30g cucumber and 30g tomatoes
- 30g radicchio and 30g frisé lettuce
Method:
- Wash chicken breast under running water and pat dry
- Trim the chicken from all sides to make it an even shape
- Make a small pocket from the top side of the chicken breast and marinate it with lemon juice, salt and ginger and garlic paste. Let it rest for an hour
- Finely chop chicken breast trimmings and season with salt, turmeric, chopped ginger, coriander and red and green capsicum peppers
- Stuff the marinated chicken breast with seasoned mince
- Marinate the stuffed chicken breast with labneh, cream, green cardamom powder, white pepper, chopped coriander, fresh ginger and salt
- Allow it to rest for another hour in the refrigerator
- Skewer the marinated stuffed chicken breast and cook in a tandoor, basting with clarified butter. Otherwise bake in a preheated oven at home for 15 minutes
- Cool chicken breast, slice evenly, season with lemon vinaigrette and serve with fresh tossed salad
Check out our very own Tried and Tested review of this recipe below..
This fancy starter was given to us by Executive Chef Amrish Sood of Ushna Restaurant and looked so amazing in the picture we were keen to see if we could replicate it.
The recipe is easy enough to follow, the only drawback of this recipe is the amount of time it takes to assemble. With two hours of marination, we were getting pretty impatient and ended up eating something else for dinner.
When marinating the chicken the first time with lemon juice be careful not to soak it in concentrated juice for too long (something we may have been guilty of) since the thinner sections of the chicken breast actually began to cook through!
We simply added the peppers, chicken trimmings and spices into a small mixer and blended it all together to make the mince. We added more peppers than required since we love them and how colourful they made the mince look.
Filling the pockets was easy enough however we did make sure to avoid overstuffing the chicken to ensure even cooking. We then dipped it in the cream marinade and left it for another hour in the fridge.
Since we weren't about to hunt around for a tandoor we simply placed the chicken breast on an oiled baking pan and cooked the chicken through for a good 25 to 30 minutes. We let it rest overnight to firm up before slicing.
The end result? Some incredibly fancy slices of chicken that really dressed up our salad. The spiced mince really did boost the flavour of the chicken and provided just enough spice to keep our resident taste tester satisfied.
If you have the time to make this, we would definitely suggest you do! It was delicious, healthy and can easily be made into a main dish with a few hearty ingredients tucked into your salad.
We give it five out of five spoons!
