Recipe: May's Chilli Chicken - Dynamited

My friend May, recently posted a recipe for Chilly Chicken She spoke about how it reminded her of the chilli chicken at RR restaurant in Bangalore. Our personal favourtie Andhra joint in Bangalore is Nandinis and they make a really fiery Andhra chilli chicken. If I had to guess the ratio, I'd say they use about 500gms chilli to 1 kilo chicken. This is our favourite dish on the menu.

 The chilli chicken I normally make at home is chicken pieces marinated in soya sauce, finely chopped green chilli and a bit of sugar to cut the heat a bit. This only goes well with Chinese style fried rice or noodles. But May's recipe seemed like something I could adapt to eat with rice and dhal. If you are looking for an Indian Chinese version, head over to May's blog. If you want a further Indianised, bit of dynamite to spice up a simple meal of rice and dhal, keep reading.

Ingredients:
1/2 kilo chicken
1 onion finely chopped
1": ginger finely chopped
12 slit green chillies (I warned you its gonna be hot, decrease, if you can't handle spice)
1.5 tbsp soya sauce
3 tablespoon tomato sauce (I increased this to counterbalance the heat)
1/2 tsp pepper powder
1/2 tbsp cornflour dissolved in 1 tbsp water
salt to taste (remember the soya sauce will be salty too)
a few drops of oil.

Method:
Clean & chop chicken, the smaller the better since we aren't marinating the meat.
Take a pan large enough for most of the chicken pieces to touch the base.
In the heated pan, splash a few drops of oil.
Quickly stir fry the onion, 8 green chillies and the ginger for 2-3 minutes on high heat.
Add the chicken pieces, quickly stir fry till the chicken changes colour (gets seared).
Add the pepper powder, soya sauce, tomato sauce and salt.
Cover and cook till chicken is tender.
Add the remaining 4 slit green chillies (adding chillies at 2 stages, gives 2 different kinds of heat when eating one from the crisply fried green chillies and one from the moist slightly cooked green chillies) and fry for a minute or so.
Add the cornflour dissolved in water (though the dish is dry, it give s a bit of crispness to the chicken pieces) and fry till completely dry.
Serve hot with rice and dhal.
The husband absolutely loved the dish and ate only chicken in his second helping. A huge compliment to the dish from a born vegetarian (recently turned non-vegetarian).

This will also go really well as a snack with drinks.

I've entered this dish in Torview's Food palette red event giveaway