Country 19: Butter Chicken from India

Suggested by a friend of mine, butter chicken was a fun and challenging meal to learn/make. While my butter chicken turned out great, I now understand why Indian food tends to be expensive, because man did I need to buy a lot of different spices in order to make this meal: cardamom pods, whole cloves, kasuri methi (AKA dried fenugreek leaves), ground coriander and more.

The process of making it was fairly involved, I marinated the chicken thighs overnight in a mix of greek yogurt and  paprika, cayenne) lemon juice and kasuri methi (the paprika and cayenne powder was to replicate kasmiri chili powder, another spice I needed, which came in a very big bag for the 2 tsp that I needed). After marinating, I pan fried the chicken and put it off to the side and made the sauce. You start off the sauce by frying off the whole spices (cardamom, cloves, cinnamon sticks) in lots of butter, which smelled amazing!! After a couple minutes of the whole spices, I added green chilis for spice and ginger/garlic paste that I made earlier by blending garlic/ginger as well as some other spices.

I added a tomato and cashew puree which again I made earlier (almond flour can also be used to replace the cashews) and brought the mixture to a light boil. Once its thickened add water and let it reduce more until the top shimmers with the fats from the butter. Now you add the chicken to the sauce and keep simmering. Finally add in salt, sugar, heavy cream and more kasuri methi. Also I added a little extra butter at this point because come on, this a pretty calorie heavy meal, might as well make it worth it. I garnished it with some cilantro and served it with basmati rice and naan bread.

I loved learning how to make this, and while I will probably break it out every once in a while to impress somebody, it is probably something I will just order from a restaurant due to how much work /investment it is. However I will try making other curries since I’m sure I can use some of my new spices to make them.

There goes another meal, 19 down, 11 to go. Thank you for reading, below are more photos and the updated map!

Cheers,

Brandon