Recipe

Asia → 🇵🇰 Pakistan → Lahore (Punjab)
Lahori Chicken Karahi
Pakistani · easy · serves 4
prep 15 min · cook 35 min
~540 cal · 59g protein · 10g carbs · 27g fat (estimated, per serving)
🍽️
Chicken karahi in a steel wok topped with ginger and cilantro
🇵🇰 Lahore (Punjab)
On Lahore’s food streets, karahi is ordered by the kilo and cooked to order in blackened steel pans over roaring flames. The Lahori style is defined by what it leaves out — no onion, no yogurt — letting tomatoes, ginger, and fresh chilies do everything.
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Ingredients
Serves 4 —
•
2 lbs chicken, bone-in, cut small
•
6 ripe tomatoes, chopped
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4 tbsp ghee
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3-inch piece fresh ginger, half minced, half julienned
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6 cloves garlic, minced
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4 green chilies, slit
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1.5 tsp black pepper, coarsely cracked
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1 tsp each ground coriander and cumin
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1 handful cilantro, chopped
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4 naan, to serve
Instructions
1
Sear the chicken (or cauliflower and chickpeas) in ghee over high heat until golden, 5 minutes.
2
Add garlic and minced ginger for 1 minute, then all the tomatoes. Cover and cook 15 minutes until they collapse.
3
Uncover and fry hard, stirring, until the water cooks off and the fat separates around a thick clinging masala, 10–12 minutes.
4
Add the cracked pepper, coriander, cumin, and slit chilies; toss 2 minutes.
5
Crown with julienned ginger and cilantro. Bring the karahi to the table with hot naan — no plates required.
Lahore food-street style.
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🌏 While it simmers — know your destination
📍
Lahore (Punjab). "He who hasn’t seen Lahore hasn’t lived" — or eaten karahi.
🗺️
Pakistan. Karahi smoke and Mughal-era richness along the Indus.
🌍
Asia. From street-cart woks to slow monastery kitchens.
The story behind this dish is up top — worth a read while the pot works.
👩‍🍳
Richard Moore & Kelsey Tucker
Recipes cooked, tested, and researched by the creators of Spin the Globe. How we build our recipes →
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