Tandoori Chicken

Tandoori chicken is chicken marinated in yogurt and a blend of spices, traditionally including red chili, ginger, garlic and garam masala, then roasted in a tandoor, a cylindrical clay oven fired with charcoal or wood at very high heat. The specific dish is a twentieth century invention credited to Kundan Lal Gujral, who ran the restaurant Moti Mahal in Peshawar beginning around 1920 and developed the marinated, tandoor-roasted preparation there in the 1920s and 1930s, partly as a way to use chicken that had not sold by the end of the day. Gujral relocated to Delhi after the 1947 partition of India and reopened Moti Mahal there, where the dish, along with his butter chicken and dal makhani, became popular with the capital's elite, reportedly including Jawaharlal Nehru. The tandoor oven itself is far older, with clay ovens and charred bones consistent with tandoor-style cooking found at Indus Valley Civilization sites dating back to roughly 3000 BCE, but that antiquity belongs to the oven, not to this specific marinated dish.