Tandoori chicken (Tandoori murgh)

Tandoori chicken or tandoori murgh is one of the most popular dishes in Indian cuisine, its name derived from the Persian word tannur, meaning fire. The dish consists of chicken meat that is marinated in yogurt, seasoned with tandoori masala, nutmeg, and cumin, then placed on skewers.

It is a unique dish because of the way it is prepared - traditionally, it is cooked at high temperatures in cylindrical clay ovens called tandoor, resulting in succulent meat with a smokey flavor. One popular theory suggests that it was invented by a man named Kundan Lal Gujral in his restaurant Moti Mahal (Palace of Pearls).

He wanted to make a new dish, so he tried cooking the chicken in the tandoor, which was mostly used for baking the famous Indian bread called naan. The dish was an instant hit with the hungry customers, and the crispy, yet succulent chicken dish even caught the attention of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharial Nehru, who often ate at the restaurant and made it a regular dish at official banquets.

The aforementioned theory belongs to the recent past, but historians claim that tandoor-cooked chicken actually dates back to the Mughal period, when the dish was merely a part of gigantic Indian feasts at the time. Tandoori chicken's fame led to many derivatives such as chicken tikka masala and butter chicken, both of them commonly found in restaurants across the country.