Delicious Baked Tandoori Chicken Sandwich Recipe

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Cooking With Anadi

12K subscribers · tandoori chicken with homemade tikkas, fresh and charred

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This Indian chicken sandwich recipe is so satisfying and extremely easy to make! If you’ve got a craving for Indian food, then there’s no excuse not to have it! This sandwich can be made in no time! This recipe is also great to make ahead of time, so you can prepare enough sandwiches for your busy week ahead!

I made this sandwich one day when I wanted a simple and delicious lunch. I have a Tandoori Chicken Wrap recipe, but felt like making the tandoori chicken and sandwiching it in some delicious rye bread! I had some salad mix and cucumbers lying around, so I thought these would be great to add into my sandwich. I also almost always have tomatoes and onions in my sandwiches, so of course those were a must-have!

Be sure to watch the video to follow along with the chicken marination and broiling, and to see how this incredible sandwich comes together! Please subscribe to my YouTube channel if you’re not already, and don’t forget to press the bell button to be notified when all of my latest video recipes are live! Let’s get cooking!

Tools Needed

• Mixing bowl
• Whisk
• Chef's knife
• Cutting board
• Baking sheet
• Wire rack
• Basting brush
• Nonstick pan
• Bamboo skewer

Ingredients for This Healthy Chicken Sandwich Recipe

This sandwich uses just a couple of fresh ingredients! All ingredients with their quantities can be found by scrolling to the bottom of this post or by pressing the “Jump to Recipe” button for the FULL PRINTABLE recipe card. You can also use the recipe card to save the recipe for later and scale the recipe based on how many sandwiches you want to make so that you know exactly how much chicken to have!

For the Marinade

• Lemon juice
• Garlic
• Ginger
• Garam masala
• Deggi mirch
• Plain yogurt
• Salt

If you don’t have Deggi mirch on hand, feel free to use paprika as a substitute!

For the Tandoori Sandwich

• Chicken thighs
• Rye bread
• Tomato
• Onions
• Salad mix
• Amla Chutney (or any mint chutney, such as Cilantro-Mint Chutney)
• Mayonnaise
• Chaat Masala
• English cucumber

If you don’t have rye bread, you can use any bread that you have on hand. I personally recommend a light rye for this bread to complement the chicken!

How to Make Baked Chicken Tandoori Sandwich

This sandwich is so easy to make! That’s why it’s perfect to make for a busy weekday lunch. Even though tandoori chicken may seem intimidating to make, with this recipe it’s really simple and anyone can make this sandwich to satisfy their craving for Indian food! Here’s what you need to do:

To Prepare the Chicken

For the first marinade

In a medium sized bowl, add lemon juice, deggi mirch and salt for the first marinade and whisk well together. Mix well, cover and let marinate for 20-30 minutes.

For the second marinade

In the same bowl as the first marinade, add the rest of the ingredients for the second marinade.

Mix well, cover and let marinate for at least 2 hours or preferably overnight.

To cook

Preheat oven to 450 F.

Take chicken out of refrigerator about 30 minutes before cooking to take off the chill from the meat. In the meantime, prepare the baking sheet by placing wire rack over the sheet. Place marinated chicken pieces on the wire rack, making sure to space the pieces apart.

Turn the oven to broil mode (top-most broiler if your oven has multiple broil modes). Carefully place the baking sheet on the top rack. Pour about 1/2 cup of water directly on baking sheet to prevent excess marinade from burning and smoking.

Turn the pieces after about 10 minutes, rotate the pan 180 degrees and cook other side. This should take another 5-10 minutes. (Note: if you are making the chicken tikka as a side and not for a curry, during the last 10 minutes, baste with butter every 5 minutes)

For more details on achieving the ultimate chicken tikka at home, be sure to check out the full recipe here.

To Assemble the Sandwich

Heat a pan on medium heat and then add butter and toast the slices of bread until toasted on each side.

In the meanwhile, combine together the amla chutney, mayonnaise and lime juice. Sprinkle a pinch of chaat masala over the chicken.

Spread the amla-mayonnaise on each slice of toast, followed by adding the greens mix, cucumbers, sliced chicken tikkas, onions and tomatoes.

Close the sandwich and secure with a bamboo skewer. Slice if desired and serve.

Other Indian Sandwiches & Wraps

• Aloo Keema Sandwich
• Chicken Tikka Kathi Roll
• McDonald’s Crispy Paneer Burger
• Spiced Chicken Keema Burger

Frequently Asked Questions

Why This Sandwich Uses Chicken Thighs

Tandoori chicken is one of the few dishes where the cut is not really a matter of preference. The recipe calls for six to eight boneless skinless chicken thighs, and the reason is heat: this chicken goes under a broiler at full blast, and a thigh has enough fat running through it to survive that and still come out juicy. Breast meat, which the recipe does list as a substitute, has almost none, so it travels from done to dry in about the time it takes to turn the pan around. If you use it, cut the cooking short. Thighs also hold their texture better against a yogurt marinade that has been sitting on them overnight, because the acid works slowly and a thigh's connective tissue turns silky under it where a lean breast simply goes soft on the surface. Cut the pieces to an inch and a half, as the recipe specifies, so they all cook through across the same fifteen to twenty minutes. And take the bowl out of the fridge half an hour before it goes in the oven: chicken that starts closer to room temperature cooks evenly, instead of charring on the outside while the middle is still cold. This is also, incidentally, where nearly all the protein in the sandwich comes from.

Deggi Mirch, Ginger and Garlic: What Makes the Marinade Tandoori

The color is the first thing people ask about, and the answer is not cayenne. Deggi mirch is a blend ground for color rather than for heat, which is exactly why the recipe can ask for three tablespoons of it in the second marinade without the sandwich becoming painful to eat. Reaching for cayenne at that quantity would be a mistake; sweet paprika is the substitution to make, and it is the one the post recommends. The other backbone of the marinade is ginger-garlic paste, three tablespoons of it. If you do not keep a jar, blend equal parts fresh ginger and garlic into a paste yourself and use the same amount, because it is the same thing, only fresher. Garam masala brings the warmth and the plain yogurt carries all of it into the meat. One more thing worth knowing: the first marinade is only lemon juice, deggi mirch and salt, and a fork is enough to whisk it together in the bowl you are going to use for everything else anyway. It exists to season the chicken and get the acid working before the yogurt arrives, which is why it gets its own twenty to thirty minutes rather than being folded into one step.

Broiling at Home Instead of a Tandoor, and Building the Sandwich

A tandoor cooks with fierce radiant heat off the walls of a clay oven, and no home kitchen has one. The broiler is the closest stand-in you have. It is essentially a grill turned upside down, throwing heat down onto the food from a few inches above instead of up from below. That is why the recipe puts the baking sheet on the top rack, and why the chicken sits on a wire rack over the sheet rather than directly in it, since air has to reach underneath or the pieces stew in their own marinade instead of charring. The half cup of water poured into the sheet is the detail people skip and then regret: without it, the marinade that drips down hits a screaming hot pan and fills the kitchen with smoke.

Once the chicken is out, the rest is assembly. Butter in a pan over medium heat for the rye, the amla chutney stirred into the mayonnaise with a tablespoon of lime juice, and a pinch of chaat masala over the chicken while it is still warm. If amla chutney is hard to find where you shop, any mint chutney does the job, and a cilantro-mint chutney is the version most people can put their hands on. Then the vegetables, and the order matters more than it sounds: the chutney-mayonnaise goes on both slices first so the bread is sealed, then the salad mix, the cucumber, the sliced tikkas, and the onion and tomato last, on top, where their juice has less chance to soak down into the toast. A bamboo skewer holds the whole thing together long enough to cut it in half.

What Makes This a Healthy Chicken Sandwich

This post calls itself a healthy chicken sandwich, so it is worth being specific about what that actually means rather than leaving it as a claim. Most of the protein comes from the chicken thighs, and because they are marinated in yogurt and lemon juice and then broiled on a wire rack rather than fried, very little fat gets added along the way. The carbohydrates and most of the fiber come from the rye bread, which is a denser and slower-burning choice than white sandwich bread, and from the salad mix, cucumber, tomato and onion stacked on top.