3 min Tandoori Paste Recipe Sauce to Marinate | MasalaHerb.com (2024)

The homemade tandoori paste is a yogurt-based vegetarian sauce prepared with spices, which is used to marinate tandoori meals such as the tandoori chicken.

This Indian aromatic paste is a time saver, and a few spoonfuls will turn your dinner into the tandoori dish from your favorite Indian restaurant!

📕 What's Tandoori?

If you don't know tandoori, you will need to catch up because it's one of the world's most favorite North Indian foods.

The tandoori paste is a traditional marinade used to infuse flavors into chicken cuts. These are then roasted in a high heat tandoori oven.

The yogurt-based marination creates a layer of spices, which not only infuse the meat, but also seals it in such a way that the meat remains moist and perfectly cooked on the inside.

In modern times, this paste is also used to marinate other foods such as veggies and mushrooms.

🍲 Ingredients

Here is what you will need to make this tandoori marination paste.

• Plain Yogurt
• Turmeric ground
• Red Chili Pepper
• Black Pepper ground
• Coriander Seeds ground
• Cumin Seeds ground
• Cinnamon ground
• Cardamom ground
• Garam Masala spice blend
• Chaat Masala spice blend (optional)
• Cloves ground
• Salt
• Ginger Garlic Paste
• Cilantro fresh and chopped
• Oil – preferably Mustard Oil, but you can also use any other oil too, such as vegetable oil, olive oil or canola oil.

If you have come across tandoori masala in stores, a special spice blend for tandoori paste, then you can use this instead of some spices.

Use tandoori masala and don't add, turmeric, chili pepper, black pepper, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves.

You can of course also add all the spices and a tad of tandoori masala together to add another layer of spice and flavor to your marination sauce.

🔪 How to make this Tandoori paste?

The tandoori paste itself is an easy 3 minutes job.

Step 1

Place yogurt in a mixing bowl. Add spices to the yogurt.

Step 2

Add ginger garlic paste, salt, chopped fresh coriander and oil.

Step 3

Mix everything well. Use to marinate meat, vegetables, tofu, or soy chunks or store to use on another day.

🥣 Uses

This spiced yogurt paste is most famously used as a tandoori chicken marinade.

Chicken pieces are left to marinate in the tandoori paste.

The chicken is then roasted in the tandoor oven or regular house oven.

This can be done with whole bone-in chicken, called tandoori chicken, or pieces of boneless kebabs, known as chicken tikka in India.

You can use the tandoori paste with other white meats, with fish, veggies such as cauliflower, mushrooms, and even with soya chunks, tofu and paneer cubes.

You can get a bit creative too.

To give you an idea, I sprinkled some paste on a pizza before baking it the other day and the pizza tasted wonderful!

The tandoori paste is vegetarian, gluten-free, low-carb, nut-free and without any artificial red food coloring.

🍱 Storing

You can prepare the tandoori paste from scratch whenever you need a fresh tandoori masala spice blend marination, or you can store it for another day.

The paste is good for 2 days in the fridge in an airtight container.

I freeze a batch and use it whenever I feel like tandoori flavors because whenever you prepare a batch you will hardly require more than a few tablespoons full.

You will be better off saving the rest of your homemade tandoori sauce for another day.

I like to freeze the paste in smaller batches in a small Tupperware or in zip lock bags.

OR pour the tandoori paste into ice cube trays and freeze (just as I did with my green papaya meat tendering paste).

Then transfer the frozen paste cubes to a zip lock bag.

That way you can use as much as you need only.

💡 Tips

• I use already ground spices to speed up things.
• For the best flavor result, dry roast whole spices, let cool and grind the spices fine.
• If you want a thick sauce, use Greek yogurt, skyr or Topfen/Quark.
• Add a pinch of dried Fenugreek leaves (called Kasturi Methi in India). It adds a lovely true Indian touch to the paste.
• To add even more flavors, use mustard oil. It's not only tastier but also healthier.

🔴 Tandoori Paste Color

Tandoori chicken is usually deep red when sold commercially, which is because food coloring is added.

You can add 1-2 drops of red food coloring if you want or paprika powder.

I didn't opt for the paprika powder in this recipe because the paprika powder is hard to be found in India and very uncommon.

Adding Paprika powder to make a red tandoori paste, wouldn't be very Indian… And I still wanted this to be as authentic as possible.

However, they do add Kashmiri Lal (Kashmiri Chili) powder to foods to add color. This particular chili variety isn't that hot but lends dishes a beautiful red color.

You can add some more of this chili powder to your dish, but your sauce will turn out a tad spicier.

🥘 More Curry Paste Recipes

• Vegan Cashew Curry Paste
• Goan Coconut Curry Paste
• Recheado Masala Paste

Dear Reader, have you ever tried preparing your own tandoori dish?

📖 Recipe