COOKING 101 – AWESOME INDIAN DISH

Everyone loves Indian food and the most popular dish is butter chicken aka chicken tikka masala (more common in the UK).  Since everybody likes to eat rather than cook, I’ll be teaching how to cook butter chicken in the easiest way possible.

THINGS YOU WILL NEED

The spices you will need

Boneless chicken – 500gms

Turmeric Powder – 1 to 2 tablespoons

Chili Powder – 1 to 2 tablespoons

Coriander Powder – 1 to 2 tablespoons

Ginger Garlic Paste – 2 to 3 tablespoons

Tomatoes – 3 to 4

Onions – 1

Cream – 10 to 15 ml

Cashew nuts – 5-6 pieces

Salt – 3 to 4 teaspoon

Sugar – A pinch

Butter – 100gms

Oil

A blender

THE CHOPPING

As much as we hate chopping, there is no avoiding it. Cut the boneless chicken into small pieces (1”x1” preferably).

Boneless chicken pieces

Chop the tomatoes into small pieces. Make sure you chop enough tomatoes so that it fills 3/4^th the volume of a cereal bowl.

Chop the onion but not in small pieces. You can keep the onion long.

Small pieces of tomatoes and long onion

THE COOKING

Marinating the Chicken –

Once you’re done with the chopping, add a tablespoon of ginger garlic paste, chili powder, turmeric powder and coriander powder each, and 2 teaspoons of salt and mix it well. Add 3-4 drops of oil if you want. It makes the mixing a little easy.

Cooking the Chicken –

Cooking the marinated chicken

In a pan, put 20-30gms of butter and let it melt. Add the marinated chicken once the butter melts. Sauté the chicken for 6-7 minutes and add 2 caps (a cola bottle cap size) of oil while sautéing. Don’t cook the chicken completely, but just enough to cook its outside layer. The inside of the chicken pieces can be raw.

Cooking the sauce/gravy –

Remove the chicken from the pan. Make sure you do not remove the oil from the pan as you will need it later for the sauce. In the same pan, add a dollop of butter and mix it with the oil that is already in the pan when you sautéed the chicken. Add the chopped onion and sauté it for a minute. Add half a tablespoon of ginger garlic paste, chili powder, turmeric powder and coriander powder each, 5-6 pieces of cashew nuts and add the chopped tomatoes. Sauté the entire mixture for 7-8 minutes or till the time the mixture is reduced to 1/4^th water (from the tomatoes) and 3/4^th is the mixture itself. Let it cool for a minute or so.

Sauteing the tomatoes and the onion

Put the entire mixture (with the water of the tomatoes) in a blender and make a puree out of it. It should look more or less like the picture below.

How the puree looks after getting mixed in a blender

The final cooking –

In a wok, add another dollop of butter and let it melt. Once the butter has melted, add the puree that you just made. If some of the puree gets stuck to the walls of the blender, put some water, mix it and add the water (that now contains a bit of the puree) from the blender to the puree in the wok. Mix it for a minute and add the half cooked chicken to it. If you feel that it is getting a bit dry, add half cup of water, mix it for 2 minutes, and add cream and the remaining butter to the dish. Continue cooking and add a pinch of sugar to it. This helps in balancing the acidity of the dish. Put a lid on the wok and continue cooking for 10-15 minutes. If required, after 10-15 minutes, reduce water from the gravy by removing the lid.

Once you've let the dish cook for 15-20 minutes, check if the chicken is cooked completely. I become rather impatient to try it once I've added all the ingredients and have to give it some time to cook. The best way to utilize this time would be to clean the mess that you have made in the kitchen while preparing the dish.

If the chicken is cooked completely, switch off the stove and voila! You are done. The dish is cooked and the kitchen is clean.

Delicious butter chicken 

Have fun making this delicious dish and let me know how it goes in the comments below.