Chicken 65

Back to the curry leaves one more time. This is a recipe from Hyderabad in southeast India. The name is, you might have noticed, kind of weird. There are a bunch of different stories about how it got the name--it originally had 65 ingredients; it was popular in 1965; truckers on Route 65 liked it--all implausibly reasonable. It's a general rule of thumb in etymology that if a word origin story makes any sort of sense, it's not true. Name aside, there's a good bit of variation in recipes and the one I picked was on the more complicated side but is still pretty easy. This version was posted to recipezaar by one Sarah Kamal who says she got it from a Hyderbadi neighbor. She posted it in hard-to-parse texting shorthand so I've reworded things (and made a few changes) for your convenience.

Chicken 65

50 min | 5 min prep

SERVES 4

1-2 cups oil, for deep frying
4 chicken breasts or thighs, sliced into strips

MARINADE FOR CHICKEN
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chile powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 Tablespoon soy sauce

BATTER FOR CHICKEN
1 egg, beaten
3 Tablespoons corn flour [I used plain-old wheat flour. I should buy some masa if corn flour is going to keep popping up in recipes I'm making.]

YOGURT MIX
500 grams yogurt, beaten
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chile powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic, finely chopped

FOR TEMPERING
3 Tablespoons oil
5-6 small hot green chiles
2 sprigs curry leaves


1. Mix the marinade ingredients, grinding the ginger and garlic into paste with a pestle. Add the chicken, mix well, and let marinate for at least an hour.


2. Mix the batter and add to the marinating chicken. Mix the yogurt mix ingredients. Heat oil and fry chicken until golden brown. When removing chicken pieces, drop them right into the yogurt.


3. In a small pan heat tempering oil over medium high heat until shimmery. Add chiles and curry leaves and they start to shrivel and color.


4. Pour oil, chiles and curry leaves into a large pan or pot over medium low heat. Add chicken and yogurt mix. Cook until the yogurt reduces, dries and forms a coating to the chicken. [Theoretically, anyway. I got worried when the yogurt started to stick to the bottom of the pan and threatening to burn so I stopped cooking it a little early.]


This manages to look even worse than the mango curry, but it's not half bad. The flavors are brightly spicy, tangy and tart. Some recipes specify sour yogurt in the ingredients so I have some confidence that that's intentional this time around. On the other hand, it's seriously lacking in bottom notes so it's not an entirely balanced dish. But you're supposed to eat it with naan and booze which probably would help with that.

The chicken is tender and moist, the yogurt coating creamy in a curdled sort of way. If you do a Google Image search you'll find a lot of pictures of much better looking Chicken 65, but if you click through you'll that those recipes use a Tablespoon or two of yogurt in the marinade, deep fry the chicken and serve. The ones with a cup or two of yogurt generally look just as unpleasant (although they usually add red food coloring which I left out). I really have no good reason for thinking that this sloppier version is any more authentic or any tastier. It was just more interesting to try making. The simpler ones do have a ring of simplification about them though, so I'm happy with my choice despite the unaesthetic results.