Recipe | Butter chicken

If there were a gateway drug to curry, this addictive dish would be it.

With murgh makhani, which loosely translates from Hindi as “chicken in butter sauce”, you get layers of spices, tangy tomatoes, and creaminess from cream and butter. Due to its mild heat level, this dish is approachable to western palates that are typically averse to heat. Visit any Indian restaurant from London’s Brick Lane to the Bo-Kaap, and you will surely find the velvety sauce-based butter chicken on the menu. 

This dish is a relative newcomer to India’s 5,000-year culinary history, originating around the 1950s in the City of Delhi. The story goes, industrious chefs wanting to use leftover tandoori roasted chicken pieces concocted the tomato-based sauce with the added luxuriousness from fresh cream, cashew nuts and copious amounts of butter. What started as a frugal business move now stands alone as the best-selling dish at most Indian restaurants.

A dish like butter chicken offers a glimpse into the diversity of Indian cooking, often stereotyped and compartmentalised into an untrue notion that all Indian food should obliterate your taste buds with incendiary fire and brimstone. Visit India, and you will be pleasantly surprised to find that cooking styles, techniques, and heat levels vary considerably from region to region.

Take the southeastern coastal city Pondicherry, for example, often referred to as the Paris of India due to the solid French colonial history. Turn a corner, and you will find freshly baked croissants that rival the best French boulangeries. Another great example is meen puyabaise — India’s answer to the classic French seafood soup bouillabaisse. Cooked along similar lines to the French technique but, unsurprisingly, with the addition of turmeric, green chillies, bay leaves, fennel seeds and so on, resulting in an indo-french fusion of flavours.

I imagine when the SS Truro docked at the then Port Natal on the November 16 1860 that, bundled up in between their most-prized, albeit meagre, possessions of the weary travellers seeking a better life was, perhaps a little masala, expertly blended, and other spices, tightly wrapped and handed down by the matriarch of the family in the hope that there would be a continuation of a culinary legacy. I can also imagine the heartache it brought when the precious little spices ran out and, more importantly, the substitutions that had to be made with what was available. Because of these very substitutions, cities like Durban can now boast a cuisine of its own, undoubtedly informed by the diaspora but with tweaks borne from pioneering. I consider how familiar yet different the flavour profiles of some of the curries I grew up eating compared with the dishes I ate in India. Butter chicken is a perfect case in point; it wasn’t until well into my early adult life that I first tasted butter chicken. As a matter of fact, it was on a trip to London that I first enjoyed the dish cooked by a Bengali chef. I was surprised by the sauce’s smoothness and the chicken’s succulence. I was not surprised to hear at one time that butter chicken was Britain’s fastest-selling ready-made meal.

Indeed not the healthiest dish with all that butter and cream, but definitely a dish to impress dinner guests or celebrate a special occasion. Due to its mild heat levels, butter chicken also pairs well with wine. Try a gewürztraminer with its low acidity and floral nose or a young fruit-forward pinot noir.

RECIPE | Butter chicken

Serves 6

Ingredients for the chicken

• 1kg deboned and skinless chicken thighs chopped into bite-size pieces
• 2 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
• ½ cup plain Greek yoghurt
• The juice of ½ a lemon
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 heaped tbsp of ginger and garlic paste
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil

Ingredients for the sauce

• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• ½ cup of raw cashew nuts
• 2 medium onions, roughly chopped
• 6 ripe Roma tomatoes, roughly chopped
• ½ cup water
• 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
• 1 green chilli
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
• ½ tsp cumin powder
• ½ tsp coriander powder
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 black cardamom
• 4 green cardamom
• 1 tbsp dried fenugreek leaves (kasuri methi)

Method

• Start by marinating the chicken; for best results, allow the chicken to marinate overnight or, at the very least, for one hour in the fridge.
• In a bowl, add the chopped chicken. I find that boneless chicken thighs are best for this dish, but boneless chicken breast can be used.
• Add yoghurt, lemon juice, ginger and garlic paste, Kashmiri chilli powder, salt and oil to the chicken and give it a good mix.
• Pre-heat the oven to 200ºC — on the grill setting
• Remove the chicken from the fridge, lay out the marinated chicken pieces on a foil-lined (for easy cleaning) baking tray and get the tray into the oven.
• Traditionally, the chicken is cooked in a tandoor. We’re trying to replicate this cooking method by grilling in the oven.
• We’re looking to get some good colour around the edges of the chicken pieces — this should take about 20 minutes, turning the chicken pieces halfway through. Be sure not to overcook the chicken as it will finish the cooking in the sauce.
• Remove the baking tray from the oven and set it aside.

The sauce

While the chicken is cooking in the oven:

• Over medium heat in a wide saucepan, add two tablespoons of oil.
• Add all the ingredients to the pan, excluding the butter, cream and fenugreek.
• Cover with a lid and cook for 20 minutes, stirring every so often. We are looking for the tomatoes and onions to soften and cook down.
• After 20 minutes, fish out the bay leaves and cinnamon stick.
• Using a stick blender, grind the spicy mixture into a thick sauce.
• Pass the sauce through a fine mesh strainer into a separate large bowl.
• You will be left with a velvety smooth sauce with the tomato skins and spices left behind in the strainer, which you can discard.
• On medium heat, transfer the strained sauce into the saucepan you used to cook.
• Add the butter, fenugreek leaves and cream and bring to a simmer
• Add the cooked chicken and stir, coating all the chicken pieces in the luscious sauce. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for five minutes.
• Garnish with a tablespoon of cream and freshly chopped coriander.

Pro-tip:

Heat a single charcoal briquette on a gas burner stove top until blistering hot. Using a pair of metal tongs, place the hot charcoal into a heatproof ramekin. Place the ramekin in the centre of the pot with the butter chicken and pour a tablespoon of melted butter or ghee over the hot charcoal. This will produce a lot of sweet-smelling smoke. Immediately cover the pot with a lid and leave for the smoke to infuse the curry.

Serve with fluffy basmati rice or pillowy garlic naan.