Chicken Chaap – Whole Chicken Legs in a Fragrant Creamy Sauce

The chicken chaap or moorgir chaap (pronounced with a nasal sound) is a Bengali celebratory specialty. Moorgir Chaap is a Mughali dish, popular on the Bengali table.

I have mega nostalgic memories of birayani and chaap.  This said, there is no one way to make this dish. What I offer here is how I make it. A few levels of trial and error, and this is what I have for you. It may or may not live up to your memories of the oil drenched version. But, this is not bad either.

My Chicken Chaap Story

Essentially, the home style fare that we try and savor and preserve was still the domain of the home cook. Dishes such as this, often belonged to the eating out domain. This said, I wanted to make it my own version.

I offer this with a couple of caveats. The traditional cut for this dish is the whole leg, essentially the thigh and leg combined.  This said, the flavors work with any bone in piece of chicken.

While some people will eat this with biryani, I feel that simple parathas or even rotis is just fine. What can I say, there is just not all that much royalty in me to savor this with more meat. This recipe uses It uses saffron for color and mace for fragrance.

Origins of Chicken Chaap

The Bengali variant of Mughlai cooking tends to be milder than its North Indian counterparts. A lot of this style of cooking is predominant in Bangladeshi cuisine. And the Bangladeshi table also has their version of this recipe. The version here is a take two, as for some reason one of the rare occasions my mom stumbled on this recipe, she did not feel I had done justice to it.

In her words, rong thik na, meaning the color was not right. Now, since we are talking Bengali festive cooking here, we are not referring to food color. Here her import was that the dish was not cooked adequately. After all, the right  nice and deep color that is appropriate can be derived from low and slow cooking.

Getting the right color added about 40 minutes additional time to the dish. However, this sauce is finger licking good. It is rare, that my husband and I end up dunking pieces of bread into a pot and eating it. However, this happened today.

A bit about the spices

The mace and nutmeg also tend to be spices used specifically for such dishes and infuse the chicken with a very delicate fragrance. They key to a good chicken chaap really is good marinating, and it turns out cooking really low and slow. I do not use a lot of oil but do use a mixture of oil and clarified butter.

The spice or the heat level in this recipe is relatively mild, so I actually serve this with sliced chilies as a garnish but no cilantro. Me, what can I say, I like to break the rules. With Nababarsha or Bengali New Year on the way, you should check this festive dish out. And today, it is my kind of Sunday dish.

How to enjoy this Chicken Chaap

Honestly speaking, the one dish that I would really think is an ultimate marriage of this chicken chaap with a carb, is this festive Malaysian rice.

Some other variations of this dish are,

Scratching Canvas version

Sandeepa’s Variation

Minie’s Version