Butter chicken

Ingredients

• Boneless chicken thigh700 g
• Thick yoghurt150 g
• Ginger — grated20 g
• Garlic4 clove
• Garam masala2 tsp
• Kashmiri chilli powder1 tsp
• Turmeric½ tsp
• Tinned tomatoes400 g
• Onion1
• Butter60 g
• Double cream120 ml
• Cashews — soaked in boiling water40 g
• Kasuri methi1 tbsp
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Mix the yoghurt with half the ginger, garlic and spices, season it and marinate the chicken for at least an hour, better overnight.

   60 min

2. 2

   Roast the chicken at 220 °C for twenty minutes, or sear it in a screaming-hot pan until it takes dark scorch marks. It can stay slightly underdone inside — the sauce will finish it.

   20 min

3. 3

   Melt the butter and fry the onion with the rest of the ginger and garlic until golden. Add the tomatoes and the spices and cook for fifteen minutes.

   20 min

4. 4

   Blend the sauce with the soaked cashews until completely smooth and return it to the pan. It is the cashews, not flour, that give the sauce its body.

   5 min

5. 5

   Return the chicken to the sauce, pour in the cream and warm it through for five minutes without letting it boil. Crush the kasuri methi between your palms, stir it in and take the pan off.

   6 min

About the dish

The dish appeared in Delhi in the 1940s, when the Moti Mahal restaurant started pouring a tomato and cream sauce over yesterday's tandoori chicken. It is one of the few Indian dishes with a known birthday.

The chicken must be roasted separately rather than stewed in the sauce. The scorched edges are part of the flavour; cook the meat in the sauce and you get something good, but a different dish.

Kasuri methi — dried fenugreek leaf — is the reason a home version usually fails to taste like a restaurant one. It is crushed between the palms and added at the very end.

Worth knowing

• — Kashmiri chilli is for colour, not heat. An ordinary chilli powder in the same quantity makes the dish inedible.
• — Cream must not boil or it splits. Drop the heat to its lowest before it goes anywhere near the pan.
• — The sauce is better the next day. Keep the chicken separate in that case and bring them together as you reheat.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

640 kcal

Protein

42 g

Fat

42 g

Carbs

18 g

Useful for this recipe

• Oven Temperature Converter

More from India

• Dal tadka — A lentil stew finished by pouring sizzling spiced fat over it. That step is the dish.
• Chicken biryani — Rice and marinated chicken finished together under a lid: the layers cook in steam rather than by stirring.