I am sending sending POST request but Laravel picks up GET

I am submitting request to my API '/api/authenticate'

Route::post('authenticate', 'api\authenticateController@authenticate');

Each time I send "POST" request server thinks that I am sending "GET" request.

In the $/public/index.php I have added the following line to dump what method I am using:

if($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == "/api/authenticate") {
        dd(Illuminate\Http\Request::capture());
}

And I keep getting

#method: "GET"

I have run:

composer dumpautoload
composer update
php artisan cache:clear
php artisan route:clear

Yet nothing helped... what might be the problem?

p.s. works find on the localhost and for tests i have been using PostMan; and below is a screenshot of me performing submit using postman : http://prntscr.com/efjwb7

Here is the code for the $\public\index.php file; you can see where I did the dd()...

<?php

/**
 * Laravel - A PHP Framework For Web Artisans
 *
 * @package  Laravel
 * @author   Taylor Otwell <taylorotwell@gmail.com>
 */

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Register The Auto Loader
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Composer provides a convenient, automatically generated class loader for
| our application. We just need to utilize it! We'll simply require it
| into the script here so that we don't have to worry about manual
| loading any of our classes later on. It feels nice to relax.
|
*/

require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/autoload.php';

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Turn On The Lights
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| We need to illuminate PHP development, so let us turn on the lights.
| This bootstraps the framework and gets it ready for use, then it
| will load up this application so that we can run it and send
| the responses back to the browser and delight our users.
|
*/

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php';

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Run The Application
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Once we have the application, we can handle the incoming request
| through the kernel, and send the associated response back to
| the client's browser allowing them to enjoy the creative
| and wonderful application we have prepared for them.
|
*/

$kernel = $app->make(Illuminate\Contracts\Http\Kernel::class);

if($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] == "/api/authenticate") {
    dd(Illuminate\Http\Request::capture());
}

$response = $kernel->handle(
    $request = Illuminate\Http\Request::capture()
);

$response->send();

$kernel->terminate($request, $response);

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