There are two components to butter chicken. The chicken and the gravy. The chicken for butter chicken should be made from the scraps of tandoori chicken. The gravy is a tomato and cream based gravy that's been appropriately spiced. Both are challenging to do correctly in a normal kitchen since very few people have a Tandoor oven in their house (the tandoor party of Tandoori Chicken.) Let's break it down.
The Tandoori Chicken scrap thing isn't really workable for me since I tend not to make whole tandoori chicken that frequently (though I should.) As a result, I don't tend to have scraps, so when I make this dish I'm usually making a lot of tandoori chicken that is usually fine on its own as a meal. I won't lie, this is a timely process, so you really have to prepare a day in advance. I use a two stage marination process, which means you can't just marinate and forget it either. Thighs, legs, and breasts are normally the cuts used for Tandoori Chicken. You can use a whole chicken (though if you do that I suggest deboning it,) but boneless chicken thighs were on sale at Publix, so that's what I used. I find thighs give a great flavor because there's a bit more fat and the chicken will stay juicy. The Marinade does a pretty good job of preventing it from drying out unless you just cook it to oblivion, so you really don't lose too much by using breasts.
One of the more important things to make this dish is, in my mind, ginger garlic paste. The ingredients are simple. Just use equal portions of ginger and garlic. I tend to make a good amount because peeling garlic and ginger is both time consuming and kind of annoying. it's easy enough to make. Take equal portions on ginger and garlic, and put these in a blender with some salt. If it's really having a hard time blending, you should add some water. You'll really want to blend it into a fine paste.
I just pureed this in my mini food processor for a couple minutes. The more pureed it is, the better texture it will be. If it's too chunky, it'll stand out in the finished product.
So the proportion of ingredients is going to vary depending on how much you're making. I was making a few pounds of thighs, so I used a few heaping tablespoons of my ginger garlic paste. I made sure to add a bit more salt and some red chile powder as well. The Indian chile powder makes a big difference, so if you can get that from an Indian Market, you probably should. You'll also need a couple of lemons to really get the texture and flavor correct as it will partially cook the chicken in this first process because of the acid.
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| Thighs! |
So this mixture is one you're only going to want to do for about 2-3 hours. After that, you're going to begin phase 2 of the marinade. This means you should use some thick Greek Yogurt (normal fat kind or it won't cook properly,) pepper, paprika, cumin, turmeric, garam masala and coriander powder. The paprika and turmeric are essentially your coloring for the chicken. I used a couple of tablespoons of paprika compared to maybe 1 each for the other spices. That'll get the red color tandoori chicken is best associated with. You're going to want to make the spice blend first and then add yogurt until it's thick enough as to stick on the chicken but loose enough as to still be workable.
I poured some oil on top as well to kind of seal the marinade and pressed some cling wrap on top of it. You can see it's pretty orange there. It'll redden up with more paprika/turmeric, but it'll also redden up during the cooking process.
The chicken can sit in the marinade for up to a day, but at the minimum it should sit at least 6 hours.
When you're ready to cook it, preheat the oven to 400. You're going to cook this for about 35 minutes or so with the chicken arrayed across a baking sheet. Tandoori chicken is cooked in a tandoor at like 800 degrees, so basically we're cooking the inside of the chicken and then we're finishing with the broiler to give it color as 500 degrees (the normal oven max) will not be enough to get this kind of color:
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| Basically what you're looking for |
Some people cook these on top of onions to serve as a mirepoix like you see when people roast chicken in French dishes. It's pretty solid thing to do. Tandoori onions are excellent to use for any kind of thing.
The gravy is more challenging and also requires a ton of spices. The opening part requires the use of onions in fat. Now, butter chicken restaurant recipes will basically cook the onion in a stick of butter; hence, butter chicken. I do most of my cooking in olive oil and then finish the dish with butter. The flavor is pretty similar, and it's a lot less butter, so that makes this dish healthier. You're basically just going to want to turn the onions translucent on mid-high. You'll then put in a couple of teaspoons of ginger garlic paste. You don't want to burn these so just a minute or so with constant stirring. Now begins the dry roasting of the spices. Butter chicken sauce spice mixes will vary from person to person, but here's mine in ratio.
1.5 Salt
.5 Pepper
.5 Cumin
.5 Red Chile Powder
1 Fenugreek
.5 Coriander Powder
1 Garam masala
.25 Turmeric
.5 Paprika
Couple bay leaves
You're going to dump this in with the onions and ginger garlic paste and keep stirring it. You're only going to do this for a minute or so or it'll burn. After the minute has passed, you add enough tomato paste to appropriately cover your onion mixture.
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| Spices roasting |
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| Tomato Paste |
You're going to stew this for a while. How long? At least 30 minutes. You can really keep it going forever though.
When you're ready to serve, pour this stuff in a blender (maybe take out the bay leaves if you can find them) and blend into a smooth gravy. You'll find this to give a very good texture. Now, you can do this with diced tomatoes or tomato puree, but the seeds tend to make the gravy more bitter and the gravy just not as smooth. Right before you serve, you add cream and butter. I'd say the cream is to taste. The butter, you can probably just go with a tablespoon or two.
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| Dinner. |
Served with some raita, some rice, palak, naan, and some chai tea, it'll beat any Indian restaurant in Gainesville going away.
