Original Jungli Maas Recipe

Now when I googled the recipe for Jungli/Junglee Maas online I just wasn’t satisfied with the recipes that I found. Jungli Maas is a very old preparation that was used to cook meat (usually wild game like boar/deer/etc) for kings when they were either travelling long distances (when there were no trains or cars, etc and transport was usually animal-pulled) or out for their hunts that also lasted for long periods of time (think weeks and even months). Due to the duration of these trips, there was very little fresh produce and grocery that was carried that got used up in the few initial days and for the rest of the time, the cooks were dependant on all the dry ingredients that were being carried or whatever fresh produce was available along they way, the latter being quite rare. Because of this the ‘dry’ ingredients that did not spoil for very long were things like dried red chilles, salt and ghee. And these are precisely the only 3 ingredients that eventually made up the ‘Jungli Maas’ preparation. Jungli means ‘wild’ and maas means ‘meat’. Wild meat ladies and gentleman had only salt + dry red chillies + ghee used to prepare the meat dish. Now ofcourse most people use meat/mutton as the ‘meat’ part of the dish and many different variations of the recipe have cropped up using garlic, onions and lots of other condiments but the true Jungli Maas is the one with just these 3 ingredients. And finally, without being able to find the original recipe online, we decided to make our own – the original way and share it here for those of you who are interested in the real deal.

Now before the quarantine for covid-19 started, we had quite a bit of meat lying in our freezer and somewhere about 2 weeks after the quarantine started we decided to ‘take care’ of all of it together because cooking it would’ve made a bit of a mess in the kitchen and we wanted to be able to clean all that up in one go rather than putting ourselves through it over and over again. So we decided to cook the meat 3 ways – regular red Indian curry + marinated for grilling/roasting in the oven to make dry starters and Jungli Maas. The Jungli Maas was ofcourse the simplest and quickest to prepare AND the tastiest of all the 3. So here we go.

Ingredients:
About 1 kg of meat – We kept the boneless pieces for this but you can even use bones but sparingly.
12-14 dry red chillies soaked in water for 15-20 minutes
Salt to taste
A whole lot of ghee (yep this isn’t for the faint hearted but you deserve to try this once in your life if it scares you that much)

Steps:
Pour the ghee in the pan. Heat it up really well.
Add the meat pieces and let them sear a bit.
Add in the soaked red chillies + salt. Mix everything together and cook until the meat is tender.
(If you feel the dish is getting too dry you have the option of adding water very little by little but that shouldn’t be a problem if you’ve used enough ghee)
And that really is it.

Enjoy the most amazing smelling and tasting meat dish you have EVER had. Just remembering this gives me the taste in my mouth. You can have this with simple rotis, soft naan and even bread to soak up that ghee. It tastes great with pretty much everything and even as is.

Make sure you dry up the pieces of meat before cooking them.

All the liquid you see here is ghee 😀

Final dish

Enjoyed with beer

These 2 pics are of the other curry preparation we made 🙂

Served with black rice and a raw peeled onion (just the way I love it!)

*These were all ofcourse made by Aman. I helped with the menial but more effort consuming chores like all the chopping and washing the utensils after. HAHAHA. Had to be mentioned for record. Ok Aman made me write that he did the boning’