Butter Chicken

Name: Butter Chicken
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 50 min
Total time: 5 h 50 min
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients: 800 g boneless skinless chicken thighs, in 4cm pieces; 2 tbsp lemon juice; 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder, for the first marinade; 1 tsp fine sea salt, for the first marinade; 150 g full-fat natural yogurt; 20 g ginger, grated, for the marinade; 4 garlic cloves, crushed, for the marinade; 1 tsp ground cumin; 1 tsp garam masala, for the marinade; 1 tbsp neutral oil, for the marinade; 50 g unsalted butter, for the sauce; 1 tbsp neutral oil, for the sauce; 4 green cardamom pods; 1 cinnamon stick; 2 whole cloves; 25 g ginger, for the sauce; 5 garlic cloves, for the sauce; 2 green chillies; 800 g tinned plum tomatoes; 40 g cashew nuts; 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder, for the sauce; 1 tsp fine sea salt, for the sauce; 1 tbsp honey; 50 g unsalted butter, fridge-cold and cubed, to finish; 150 ml double cream; 1 tbsp dried fenugreek leaves (kasuri methi); 1 tsp garam masala, to finish

मुर्ग़ मक्खनी

Murgh makhani

Englishहिन्दी

मुर्ग़ मक्खनी — buttery chicken.

Tandoori-marinated chicken grilled hard, then finished in a sieved tomato and butter gravy emulsified off the heat so it stays satin rather than splitting.

Prep: 30 min
Cook: 50 min
Resting: 4 hr 30 min
Total: 5 hr 50 min
Serves: 4
Revisions: 1

Butter Chicken shot from directly overhead, a true flat lay

Allergens

Milk
Nuts

Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.

Nobody has rated this recipe yet.

What to expect

Taste: Sweet first, and much sweeter than people expect from a curry: it comes from the tomatoes reduced hard, the honey and the cashews, and it lands before anything else does. Salt and a mild fruity chilli warmth arrive underneath it, and there is a low savoury depth from the browned yogurt crust that came off the grill with the chicken. The last thing is a faint, distinctly bitter, almost maple-savoury note from the dried fenugreek leaves, and it is the note that stops the whole thing reading as tomato soup with butter in it. Heat is present but low; this is a rich dish rather than a hot one.
Aroma: Butter and toasted cardamom over cooked tomato, with the grill smoke from the chicken sitting on top of it. The fenugreek crushed between the palms at the end is the sharpest smell in the process and it fills a kitchen immediately, somewhere between celery leaf, burnt sugar and hay.
Texture: The point of the dish. The sauce is completely smooth, with no shred of tomato skin or grain of spice, because it has been blended and then sieved, and it is thick enough to coat rather than to pour. Against that, the chicken is fibrous and slightly chewy at the charred edges. There is no crunch anywhere and there is not supposed to be.
Sound: Very little. The loudest moment in the whole recipe is the grill spitting as fat drips off the chicken onto hot foil. The finished dish is silent food.
How the flavour moves: Sweet, then rich, then warm, then bitter. Tomato sweetness arrives immediately and fills the front of the mouth. Butter and cream follow and coat everything, which is why the heat feels gentler than the quantity of chilli suggests. Warm spice comes through in the middle. The finish is the fenugreek, faintly bitter, and it is what makes you want the next mouthful rather than feeling you have had enough.
Serve it: Hot but not scalding, and it must be served hot enough to stay loose: the butter emulsion stiffens noticeably as it cools, so a bowl left standing goes from satin to a heavy paste within about ten minutes.
Goes with: Plain naan or a garlic naan to push it around with, and steamed basmati to absorb it. Something sharp on the side is worth having, because there is nothing acidic in the dish itself: raw red onion in lemon juice, or plain yogurt. Beer over wine.

Cook's notes

Difficulty: Moderate. Nothing in it is technically hard, but the finish has to be done off the heat and in order, and that is where it is usually lost.
Cost: Mid. Thighs are cheap, cashews and butter are not, and the quantity of butter is not a place to economise given what the dish is called.
Equipment: A grill that gets genuinely hot, a blender, a sieve, a heavy pan and a probe thermometer.
When to make it: A weekend, or a weeknight where the marinating was done the night before. The active cooking is under an hour.
Best season: None. Tinned tomatoes make it a year-round dish.
You know it is done when: Under the grill, look for the yogurt drying to a matte crust and the edges of the pieces blackening in patches, not browning evenly. In the pan, the sauce is ready when it is uniformly orange-red, opaque and glossy, and a spoon dragged across the surface leaves a channel that closes slowly.
And it feels like: The finished sauce should coat the back of a spoon in an even film with no beads of oil sitting on it. Oil pooling on the surface after the butter has gone in means it was too hot and the emulsion has broken.
Food safety: 74C/165F at the thickest piece. The chicken deliberately comes out from under the grill underdone and is finished in the sauce, so the temperature check belongs at the end and not at the grill stage.
Where it goes wrong: Boiling the sauce after the cream and butter go in, which splits it irreversibly.
Skipping the sieve, which is the difference between makhani and a rough tomato curry.
Grilling the chicken through, so it has nothing left to give when it goes into the sauce and eats like rubber.
Crowding the grill tray, which steams the chicken in its own yogurt and produces no char at all.
Throwing away the blackened residue on the foil, which is a large part of the flavour.
Blending the whole spices instead of fishing them out, which leaves a woody grit no sieve removes.
If it does go wrong: Split, with oil on top: it boiled after the butter went in. Take it off the heat, let it cool a little and whisk in a tablespoon of cold cream, which will usually pull it back. Gritty: the whole spices were blended in, or the sieve was skipped. Tastes flat and sweet: it needs salt, and it needs the fenugreek. Pale and pink rather than red: the tomatoes were not reduced long enough, or ordinary chilli powder was used instead of Kashmiri.
Making it ahead: The sauce can be made through the sieving stage up to two days ahead and refrigerated. Grill the chicken and finish it on the day.
Keeping it: Three days covered in the fridge. The emulsion firms as it chills and the sauce sets almost solid.
Reheating: Low heat, stirring, and stop before it bubbles. A reheat that boils will split what you carefully did not split the first time. A splash of water or cream helps it come back together.
Freezing: Freezes acceptably for two months, but the butter emulsion breaks on thawing. Reheat very gently and whisk in a knob of fresh cold butter at the end to bring it back.
Leftovers: Good with rice the next day, and better still in a wrap with red onion. The sauce alone, thinned, makes a fast base for paneer or roast cauliflower.
Scaling it: Doubles cleanly. Grill in two trays rather than one crowded one.
Substitutions: Cashews can be blanched almonds. Chicken breast works if it is cut into 4cm pieces and grilled for 6 to 7 minutes rather than 12, but thigh is a genuinely better fit here because the sauce is rich and the meat needs to hold its own. Dried fenugreek leaves have no substitute worth using; without them the sauce tastes sweet and slightly flat, and the faint bitter savoury note that makes it read as makhani is missing.
Dietary swaps: Contains milk and tree nuts. Gluten free and egg free as written. A dairy-free version can be built on coconut cream and a plant butter, but it is a different dish and should be described as one.
Shopping for it: Kashmiri chilli powder and dried fenugreek leaves both come from an Indian grocer and neither has a good supermarket substitute.
Keeping the cost down: Thighs rather than breast, and tinned tomatoes rather than fresh, which are also better here.
Nutrition: Rich. A hundred grams of butter and 150ml of cream across four servings, and that is what the dish is.
Worth it?: The extra fifteen minutes of blending and sieving is the whole recipe. Skip it and you have made something else.

Where it comes from

Origin: Delhi, in the middle of the twentieth century, in a restaurant kitchen.
Also called: Murgh makhani.
Said out loud: moorg mukh-KHA-nee.
What the name means: Murgh is chicken and makhani means buttery, from makhan, butter. The name describes the sauce and not the bird.
History: The dish belongs to the wave of Punjabi restaurant cooking that arrived in Delhi with people displaced by Partition in 1947, and it is bound up with the tandoor: butter chicken exists because tandoori chicken exists and dries out on standing. The account usually given is that leftover tandoori pieces were revived in a gravy of tomato, butter and cream. The restaurant most often named is Moti Mahal. Which of its founders actually devised it is genuinely contested, has been argued publicly by their descendants and taken to court in Delhi, and cannot be resolved from the record as it stands.
Why it matters: One of the two or three dishes that represent Indian food abroad, and one of the very few restaurant inventions that has been absorbed back into home cooking in India rather than remaining a restaurant thing.
When it is eaten: Restaurant food and party food rather than everyday cooking. It is what gets ordered for people who do not want to be challenged, which is both its appeal and the reason it is looked down on.
The traditional way: Two-stage marination and a tandoor. The domestic substitute is a grill run at maximum with the chicken on foil, which gets the char but not the smoke.
How it changed: Restaurant versions have got sweeter and redder over sixty years, and outside India they are often built with cream and tomato purée and no reduction at all. The version with a properly reduced and sieved tomato base is closer to the original idea and less sweet than most people expect butter chicken to be.
Regional variations: In Britain and North America the sauce is usually thinner, sweeter and finished with far more cream. Some Indian versions use no cashew at all and rely entirely on butter for body.
How this version differs: The relationship with chicken tikka masala, which is also in this collection, is the thing worth being straight about. The two dishes are unmistakably similar: marinated chicken cooked over fierce heat, then finished in a spiced tomato sauce enriched with dairy. Butter chicken has a documented association with mid-century Delhi. Tikka masala's origin is usually claimed for Britain in the 1970s and there is no documentation for it at all. Which came from which, or whether one is simply the other rebuilt from memory in a different kitchen, is not something the record can settle, and anyone who tells you confidently is guessing. What can be said is what is on the plate: our butter chicken has no onion in it, is built on tomato and butter alone and is passed through a sieve, while our tikka masala starts with a fried onion base, uses ground almonds and finishes with coriander. Cook them side by side and they do not taste alike.
Sources and credit: Contested. Moti Mahal in Delhi is the restaurant almost always named; the individual is disputed among the founders' successors.

Butter Chicken

मुर्ग़ मक्खनी

Murgh makhani

Englishहिन्दी

मुर्ग़ मक्खनी — buttery chicken.

Tandoori-marinated chicken grilled hard, then finished in a sieved tomato and butter gravy emulsified off the heat so it stays satin rather than splitting.

Prep: 30 min
Cook: 50 min
Resting: 4 hr 30 min
Total: 5 hr 50 min
Serves: 4
Revisions: 1

Allergens

Milk
Nuts

Nobody has rated this recipe yet.

What to expect

Taste: Sweet first, and much sweeter than people expect from a curry: it comes from the tomatoes reduced hard, the honey and the cashews, and it lands before anything else does. Salt and a mild fruity chilli warmth arrive underneath it, and there is a low savoury depth from the browned yogurt crust that came off the grill with the chicken. The last thing is a faint, distinctly bitter, almost maple-savoury note from the dried fenugreek leaves, and it is the note that stops the whole thing reading as tomato soup with butter in it. Heat is present but low; this is a rich dish rather than a hot one.
Aroma: Butter and toasted cardamom over cooked tomato, with the grill smoke from the chicken sitting on top of it. The fenugreek crushed between the palms at the end is the sharpest smell in the process and it fills a kitchen immediately, somewhere between celery leaf, burnt sugar and hay.
Texture: The point of the dish. The sauce is completely smooth, with no shred of tomato skin or grain of spice, because it has been blended and then sieved, and it is thick enough to coat rather than to pour. Against that, the chicken is fibrous and slightly chewy at the charred edges. There is no crunch anywhere and there is not supposed to be.
Sound: Very little. The loudest moment in the whole recipe is the grill spitting as fat drips off the chicken onto hot foil. The finished dish is silent food.
How the flavour moves: Sweet, then rich, then warm, then bitter. Tomato sweetness arrives immediately and fills the front of the mouth. Butter and cream follow and coat everything, which is why the heat feels gentler than the quantity of chilli suggests. Warm spice comes through in the middle. The finish is the fenugreek, faintly bitter, and it is what makes you want the next mouthful rather than feeling you have had enough.
Serve it: Hot but not scalding, and it must be served hot enough to stay loose: the butter emulsion stiffens noticeably as it cools, so a bowl left standing goes from satin to a heavy paste within about ten minutes.
Goes with: Plain naan or a garlic naan to push it around with, and steamed basmati to absorb it. Something sharp on the side is worth having, because there is nothing acidic in the dish itself: raw red onion in lemon juice, or plain yogurt. Beer over wine.

Cook's notes

Difficulty: Moderate. Nothing in it is technically hard, but the finish has to be done off the heat and in order, and that is where it is usually lost.
Cost: Mid. Thighs are cheap, cashews and butter are not, and the quantity of butter is not a place to economise given what the dish is called.
Equipment: A grill that gets genuinely hot, a blender, a sieve, a heavy pan and a probe thermometer.
When to make it: A weekend, or a weeknight where the marinating was done the night before. The active cooking is under an hour.
Best season: None. Tinned tomatoes make it a year-round dish.
You know it is done when: Under the grill, look for the yogurt drying to a matte crust and the edges of the pieces blackening in patches, not browning evenly. In the pan, the sauce is ready when it is uniformly orange-red, opaque and glossy, and a spoon dragged across the surface leaves a channel that closes slowly.
And it feels like: The finished sauce should coat the back of a spoon in an even film with no beads of oil sitting on it. Oil pooling on the surface after the butter has gone in means it was too hot and the emulsion has broken.
Food safety: 74C/165F at the thickest piece. The chicken deliberately comes out from under the grill underdone and is finished in the sauce, so the temperature check belongs at the end and not at the grill stage.
Where it goes wrong: Boiling the sauce after the cream and butter go in, which splits it irreversibly.
Skipping the sieve, which is the difference between makhani and a rough tomato curry.
Grilling the chicken through, so it has nothing left to give when it goes into the sauce and eats like rubber.
Crowding the grill tray, which steams the chicken in its own yogurt and produces no char at all.
Throwing away the blackened residue on the foil, which is a large part of the flavour.
Blending the whole spices instead of fishing them out, which leaves a woody grit no sieve removes.
If it does go wrong: Split, with oil on top: it boiled after the butter went in. Take it off the heat, let it cool a little and whisk in a tablespoon of cold cream, which will usually pull it back. Gritty: the whole spices were blended in, or the sieve was skipped. Tastes flat and sweet: it needs salt, and it needs the fenugreek. Pale and pink rather than red: the tomatoes were not reduced long enough, or ordinary chilli powder was used instead of Kashmiri.
Making it ahead: The sauce can be made through the sieving stage up to two days ahead and refrigerated. Grill the chicken and finish it on the day.
Keeping it: Three days covered in the fridge. The emulsion firms as it chills and the sauce sets almost solid.
Reheating: Low heat, stirring, and stop before it bubbles. A reheat that boils will split what you carefully did not split the first time. A splash of water or cream helps it come back together.
Freezing: Freezes acceptably for two months, but the butter emulsion breaks on thawing. Reheat very gently and whisk in a knob of fresh cold butter at the end to bring it back.
Leftovers: Good with rice the next day, and better still in a wrap with red onion. The sauce alone, thinned, makes a fast base for paneer or roast cauliflower.
Scaling it: Doubles cleanly. Grill in two trays rather than one crowded one.
Substitutions: Cashews can be blanched almonds. Chicken breast works if it is cut into 4cm pieces and grilled for 6 to 7 minutes rather than 12, but thigh is a genuinely better fit here because the sauce is rich and the meat needs to hold its own. Dried fenugreek leaves have no substitute worth using; without them the sauce tastes sweet and slightly flat, and the faint bitter savoury note that makes it read as makhani is missing.
Dietary swaps: Contains milk and tree nuts. Gluten free and egg free as written. A dairy-free version can be built on coconut cream and a plant butter, but it is a different dish and should be described as one.
Shopping for it: Kashmiri chilli powder and dried fenugreek leaves both come from an Indian grocer and neither has a good supermarket substitute.
Keeping the cost down: Thighs rather than breast, and tinned tomatoes rather than fresh, which are also better here.
Nutrition: Rich. A hundred grams of butter and 150ml of cream across four servings, and that is what the dish is.
Worth it?: The extra fifteen minutes of blending and sieving is the whole recipe. Skip it and you have made something else.

Where it comes from

Origin: Delhi, in the middle of the twentieth century, in a restaurant kitchen.
Also called: Murgh makhani.
Said out loud: moorg mukh-KHA-nee.
What the name means: Murgh is chicken and makhani means buttery, from makhan, butter. The name describes the sauce and not the bird.
History: The dish belongs to the wave of Punjabi restaurant cooking that arrived in Delhi with people displaced by Partition in 1947, and it is bound up with the tandoor: butter chicken exists because tandoori chicken exists and dries out on standing. The account usually given is that leftover tandoori pieces were revived in a gravy of tomato, butter and cream. The restaurant most often named is Moti Mahal. Which of its founders actually devised it is genuinely contested, has been argued publicly by their descendants and taken to court in Delhi, and cannot be resolved from the record as it stands.
Why it matters: One of the two or three dishes that represent Indian food abroad, and one of the very few restaurant inventions that has been absorbed back into home cooking in India rather than remaining a restaurant thing.
When it is eaten: Restaurant food and party food rather than everyday cooking. It is what gets ordered for people who do not want to be challenged, which is both its appeal and the reason it is looked down on.
The traditional way: Two-stage marination and a tandoor. The domestic substitute is a grill run at maximum with the chicken on foil, which gets the char but not the smoke.
How it changed: Restaurant versions have got sweeter and redder over sixty years, and outside India they are often built with cream and tomato purée and no reduction at all. The version with a properly reduced and sieved tomato base is closer to the original idea and less sweet than most people expect butter chicken to be.
Regional variations: In Britain and North America the sauce is usually thinner, sweeter and finished with far more cream. Some Indian versions use no cashew at all and rely entirely on butter for body.
How this version differs: The relationship with chicken tikka masala, which is also in this collection, is the thing worth being straight about. The two dishes are unmistakably similar: marinated chicken cooked over fierce heat, then finished in a spiced tomato sauce enriched with dairy. Butter chicken has a documented association with mid-century Delhi. Tikka masala's origin is usually claimed for Britain in the 1970s and there is no documentation for it at all. Which came from which, or whether one is simply the other rebuilt from memory in a different kitchen, is not something the record can settle, and anyone who tells you confidently is guessing. What can be said is what is on the plate: our butter chicken has no onion in it, is built on tomato and butter alone and is passed through a sieve, while our tikka masala starts with a fried onion base, uses ground almonds and finishes with coriander. Cook them side by side and they do not taste alike.
Sources and credit: Contested. Moti Mahal in Delhi is the restaurant almost always named; the individual is disputed among the founders' successors.

Butter Chicken

Allergens

Ingredients

Method

What to expect

Cook's notes

Where it comes from

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Categories

Butter Chicken

Allergens

Ingredients

Method

What to expect

Cook's notes

Where it comes from

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Allergens

Ingredients

Method

What to expect

Cook's notes

Where it comes from

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Allergens

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Method

What to expect

Cook's notes

Where it comes from

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Categories