The Best Butter Chicken Recipe

Butter Chicken is a popular English curry dish with East Indian spices. The British habit of conquering foreign places brought many intriguing flavors back home to the motherland and this dish is one result of that. This is one of our favorite dishes at the 2 Cooks household.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Butter Chicken.

Cut the Chicken

We begin this recipe by preparing our chicken. First we need to cut it up. We like to cut it into fairly large bite size pieces so it has some substance when the dish is all cooked. You will want to get this started early in the day as it needs to marinate for at least 4 1/2 hours.

Freshly Grated Ginger

Next we want to get some flavor on our chicken. We’ll start with ginger that has been grated with a microplane. There are many variations of this tool on Amazon but we just use the basic one. Grate the ginger and add it to the chicken pieces.

Chuile Powder, Salt and Garlic

We will also add chile powder, salt and minced garlic and stir it all together well. You’ll want to cover the chicken at this point and put it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Prepare the Yogurt Sauce

While the chicken is resting in the refrigerator we can prepare our yogurt sauce. We will be making a mixture that has several of the spices common to curries; garam masala, turmeric and cumin with a little bit of lemon juice.

Marinate the Chicken

We will get all those ingredients mixed together and then add it to our chicken after it has rested for a half hour. Get this stirred in well so all the chicken is coated and then cover and let it marinate in the refrigerator for at least four hours.

Put Chicken On Skewers On a Roasting Pan

We can go about our day and come back in the afternoon to our marinated bowl of chicken. Turn on the oven to 350 degrees and then we will put the chicken on skewers and put those skewers on a greased, foil lined roasting pan. This does get messy and there is turmeric involved so the foil helps with the clean up. You can even consider wearing a glove to protect your hand from staining.

Cook 12 Minutes At 350°

Once the oven is hot we will cook the chicken for 12 minutes on the first side. Then we will take it out of the oven, sprinkle some oil on the skewers and then turn them over. The oil will help keep the chicken from sticking to the foil.

Cook 10 More Minutes

Then we will put the chicken back in the oven for ten more minutes. Once it is done, set it aside to cool while we start making our sauce.

Make the Sauce

We start our sauce by heating some ghee in a large pot over a medium flame. Ghee is a clarified butter that has a higher burn point than butter that still has the milk solids in it. We also add a lot of spices to it when we make ghee so it is both flavorful and fragrant. Our kitchen starts to smell great right away.

Add Garlic and Ginger

Once the ghee is hot we will add our garlic and ginger to the pan. Stir this in and let it start cooking a bit.

Cardamom Pods

Now we need to crush two cardamom pods. We will do this in the mortar and pestle to try to get both the pods and the seeds crushed a little. Then we will add them to the pot.

Cloves, Chile Powder, Turmeric, Garam Masala and Coriander

Next we want to add the rest of our spices. We’ll add the cloves, chile powder, turmeric, garam masala and coriander and give that a good stir. We want to let this cook for a good five minutes until it is really fragrant.

Add Tomato Puree

Our spices will have soaked up some of the butter and dried out the pan a bit so we need to add some moisture at this point. We will add one large can of tomato puree to the pan as well as some lemon juice and stir those in. As soon as the tomato puree gets in the pan it will start splashing so be sure to have a lid handy.

Add the Chicken To the Pot

We’ll make sure the sauce is mixed well with the cooked spices and then we will add the chicken to the pot. It comes off the skewers fairly easily and it’s covered with all those good flavors we put on a while ago.

Add Butter and Heavy Cream

We’ll stir the chicken in thoroughly and then add our butter and heavy cream. We will stir everything together and then let it cook for at least an hour, letting all those flavors marry and cook together.

When it is all done you will have a pot of creamy delectable stew. We like to serve it over rice.

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Here are some other curry recipes you can make:

• Red Curry Chicken
• Red Curry Pork Tenderloin
• Red Curry Salmon
• Yellow Curry Crab
• Crab Stuffed Mushrooms With Yellow Curry Sauce
• Thai Coconut Curry Crab
• Chicken Satay With Peanut Sauce
• Southern Indian Lamb Curry

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