Ajoy Joshi and his wife Meera run a couple of Sydney’s best and most well-known Indian restaurants, including Nilgiri’s, their long-standing spot in St Leonards. Ajoy Joshi is regarded as an authority on Indian food, both overseas and in Australia. I was recently lucky enough to meet him during a dinner at Tellicherry, his new restaurant in Neutral Bay. He talked about his training in India and his cooking philosophy. Ajoy also mentioned that he shares some of his favourite recipes on his blog, ‘Thoughts from Ajoy’. So, of course the following day I checked out Ajoy’s blog to find some authentic Indian recipes. One recipe that caught my eye straight away was his whole Tandoori chicken. Ajoy calls it his ‘king of kebabs’ – because he skewers a whole chicken.

I’m not going to cover the recipe here because it’s laid out step by step on Ajoy’s blog – and I simply couldn’t do the instructions justice. But rather I wanted to share a link to the recipe as well as photos of how my version turned out.

The recipe

What’s great about this recipe is that it’s easy to replicate at home because you don’t need a special tandoor oven – just a standard oven does the trick. But this isn’t a recipe if you’re time poor – a two-step marinade means it needs to be started hours in advance. And for best results it’s recommended that you make your garam masala spice mix from scratch (Ajoy covers this too). But if you’ve got the time then the results really are worth it.

Link to Enjoy’s blog: Ajoy’s whole Tandoori chicken oven-cooked

My photos

If you follow any other great blogs from professional chefs then I’d love to hear about them!

By Laura (Feast Wisely)

Other recipes you might like:

• A tomato kasundi recipe – full of superfoods
• Butter chicken – a health Indian curry
• Indian mango chutney – Gujarati methia keri pickle
• Tellicherry – coastal eats by Nilgiri’s