Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with a sumptuous, authoritative version

By Leslie Brenner

October 20 is one of our favorite food holidays of the year: World Butter Chicken Day.

Murgh Makhani, also known as “Butter Chicken,” is arguably the world’s most beloved Indian dish. It’s certainly one of our favorite dishes at Cooks Without Borders, and our recipe — developed and tweaked over a number of years — has a special story. It also has a stamp of approval from Monish Gujral, the Delhi-based chef and restaurateur whose grandfather created the dish 102 years ago.

What — an actual person created Butter Chicken?

That’s right. “Butter chicken was invented by Kundan Lal Gujral at Moti Mahal, which was established in 1920,” explains Monish Gujral, who today presides over what has become the Moti Mahal empire of some 250 restaurants around the world.

The first World Butter Chicken Day, in 2020, celebrated the centenary of the restaurant that birthed the dish.

Curious as it may sound, the idea for the food holiday came from Cooks Without Borders; we wrote about it that inaugural year in an article for The Dallas Morning News. Pranjali Bhonde wrote about it last year for Whetstone.

Read: “Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with the real thing — made quicker, easier and lip-smackingly delicious”

Our Monish Gujral-approved version of the dish is a glorious way to celebrate — tonight, this weekend or anytime the craving strikes.

RECIPE: World Butter Chicken

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Cookbooks We Love: The flavors of India's cultural capital shine in 'Kolkata'

By Leslie Brenner

Kolkata: Recipes from the Heart of Bengal, by Rinku Dutt, photographs by Steven Joyce; 2022, Smith Street Books, $35.

We’ve fallen in love with ‘Kolkata’ — the debut cookbook from London food-truck proprietor Rinku Dutt — set to be published this week, on Tuesday, October 18.

Backgrounder

Author Dutt was born and raised in London, but her family is from Kolkata (the Indian city that was known under colonial rule as Calcutta), and has always maintained close ties. In the heart of West Bengal, Kolkata is considered the cultural capital of the country; it’s nicknamed “The City of Joy.” It was there that her great-grandfather founded a restaurant, Central Hotel, whose named changed after Independence to Amber. (It’s still open!) Dutt began her career in banking, and was also a classical Indian dancer. She later spent three years living in Kolkata, working in the fashion industry, diving deep into the food culture and falling even more in love with the city than she already was.

Returning to London in 2014, she founded the Bengali food truck and pop-up restaurant Raastawala with her father and brother, and contributed Indian recipes to several of the Leon cookbooks.

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Why We Love ‘Kolkata’

Dutt paints a captivating picture of the city and its culture (aided by Steven Joyce’s evocative photographs), offering such a strong sense of it that invokes a sudden longing to get there. “The architecture may be damp and deteriorating,” she writes, “but it is all so vibrant with colour. The bells ringing in the temples, incense sticks burning, smelling the aromas of food being cooked in the houses as you walk by, the balconies, the crumbling paint, the rickshaws, autos and yellow taxis . . .”

Happily for those who mean to get there, Dutt provides (buried near the end of the book) a compelling list of restaurants to visit.

Meanwhile, Dutt does a wonderful job explaining how people within the culture eat — something that too few cookbooks achieve:

“Unlike many cuisines where a meal may be comprised of one or a few courses, in Bengali cuisine, all (and often that means many) dishes are served together, but their are eaten in very specific combinations, one after the other. A classic order (and one that we use at our family table when entertaining and when in Kolkata) starts the meal with rice, followed by a bitter (shukto or shaak) palate cleanser, then a dal (a lentil dish) with a bhaja (battered fried vegetables), then a vegetable dish, a fish dish and next a meat dish, with a chutney and a salad on the side.”

She adds that an everyday meal in most Bengali households consists of “rice, dal, a vegetable and either a meat or fish dish.” That’s a useful blueprint for how to use the book — for weeknight dinners, or for more elaborate entertaining.

Masoor Dal (Red Lentil Dal) from ‘Kolkata’

Dutt’s recipes, many gleaned from her grandmother and other family, are wonderful — particularly in the way they layer spices — and they’re simple enough to be do-able for home cooks. Many are prepared using a karai (or kadhai, an Indian pan with steep, sloped sides) or a wok. We tested them using a wok; a deep skillet with sloped sides would work just as well for those we tested.

A Delicious Place to Start

Kolkata is on the Hooghly River, just inland from the Bay of Bengal, and Dutt describes a food culture that reveres seafood, so we dove in with Shrimp with Poppy Seeds — Chingri Posto. A dish the author learned from her mother, who had fond memories of her own mother making it, it’s easy, memorable and delicious.

RECIPE: ‘Kolkata’ Shrimp with Poppy Seeds (Chingri Posto)

This Cauliflower Dry-Fry — Phulkopi Bhaja — is also excellent, and easily achieved, cloaked with nigella seeds, turmeric, a bit of dried red chile and chopped cilantro. Our only complaint was there was too little of it; we doubled Dutt’s ingredients in our adaptation to make enough to serve 4 to 6. (It seems more worth the effort to make a whole cauliflower head’s worth; if there are leftovers, they’re still delicious.)

RECIPE: ‘Kolkata’ Cauliflower Dry-Fry (Phulkopi Bhaja)

And here’s a heart-warming Red-Lentil Dal (Masoor Dal, shown abobve) we’ll be making on a regular basis.

RECIPE: Red Lentil Dal (Masoor Dal)

You’ve Gotta Try This

This sumptuous dish gets a one-two-coriander punch, as chicken thighs are marinated in a thick paste involving lots of fresh cilantro (coriander) leaves and stems, and then ground coriander seeds are added as the dish cooks. Cumin, cloves, cinnamon, peppercorns and chiles add layered complexity. Once marinated (ideally overnight), it’s a snap to pull together.

RECIPE: Rinku Dutt’s Coriander Chicken

Still Wanna Make

So many things! I’ll want to concoct some Tomato and Prune Chutney to go with the Coriander Chicken next time I make that. There’s a “Rich and Thick” Lamb Curry (Kosha Mansho), “served up at most weddings and family gatherings” — high on the list. Lentil Cakes in Gravy looks magnificent, as do Onion Fritters (Piyaji). Eggplant and Spinach Dry-Fry will likely be on our table soon; ditto Ron’s Chicken Biryani (the author’s dad’s recipe). In the seafood department, Jumbo Shrimp in a Thick Coconut Gravy looks incredible, and so does Banana-Leaf Steamed Mustard Fish.

Speaking of which, considering that Kolkata is such a seafood town, I do wish there were more seafood recipes. Several of them call for salmon or tuna, as cooks outside of Bengal wouldn’t have access to the fishes used there; I found myself wishing Dutt stretched a bit to suggest less-Western solutions.

One more wish — in case the author has a second book in mind (which I hope she does!): a bit more help with ingredients, techniques and equipment. I know readers often skip over such “basics” chapters, but I felt this book could have used a brief one, answering questions like what’s the difference between white and black (aka blue) poppy seeds, something about various lentils, whether it’s worth buying karai if you don’t already own one, what type of potatoes are favored for these dishes, a bit about the dry-frying technique used a number of times, and so forth.

That’s small stuff, though. This debut cookbook is one we highly recommend. Grab a couple: one for yourself, and one for an Indian-food-loving friend. And it’s so pretty, it’ll make a fine holiday gift.

BUY ‘KOLKATA’ AT BOOKSHOP

BUY ‘KOLKATA’ AT AMAZON

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Mix and match these recipes to conjure a spectacular Indian feast (and yes, we have Butter Chicken!)

By Leslie Brenner

Imagine inviting your family or friends to sit down to a sumptuous Indian feast, all prepared by you during a fragrant and soul-soothing afternoon in the kitchen.

The experience can absolutely be yours, and more easily than you might think. Your spread can be vegetarian, or it can star one of my own family’s absolutely favorite dishes — murgh makhani, known the world over as butter chicken. Below you’ll find menus (and recipes!) for both.

With the exception of just one of the recipes (a deliciously transporting dish of charred baby eggplants that calls for curry leaves), everything you’ll need should be available in a well-stocked general-purpose supermarket.

If it’s the butter chicken-centered feast you’re after, surround the main dish with basmati rice, cucumber raita, a minty coriander chutney and something green. When I orchestrated a birthday dinner for my husband Thierry recently, our green was baby spinach simply sautéed with garlic.

If you’d like your feast to be plant-based, you might choose a jazzy saag paneer (simmered greens with fresh Indian cheese) as your centerpiece. I love the version from Maneet Chauhan’s book Chaat, which uses pretty much any kind of greens you like (spinach, chard, collard greens, etc.) — or stick with spinach, if that’s what you’re craving. Use Chauhan’s method for making wonderful home-made paneer (that’s the fresh cheese); for that I’d probably make the cheese the day before. But you could swap that for purchased paneer. Alternatively, do as Priya Krishna does in her book Indian-Ish and use feta in place of paneer.

Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer

For a butter chicken feast, I keep it pretty simple. Murgh makhani is the only dish that’s very involved, and to that I add plain basmati rice (perfect for soaking up all that delicious, rich sauce), something simple and green (like that spinach), plus cucumber raita and coriander chutney — both of which come together quickly, with no cooking. If I’m feeling carby, I might pick up some garlic naan from Trader Joe’s. If you’d like an actual recipe for an excellent Indian-style veg, Peas and Potatoes Cooked in a Bahari Style or Spinach with Dill (Dakhini Saag) are both super easy; both come from Madhur Jaffrey’s wonderful Vegetarian India, which we reviewed in 2015.

If you want to achieve a few things ahead of time, you can make the raita and chutney the day before, along with one of the ingredients in the butter chicken: Ginger-Garlic Paste. (Note: That’s also something you can pick up in Indian groceries, but I have found the one’s I’ve bought too salty or off-tasting.) Toast and grind spices and make a fabulous garam masala in advance, or you can buy a really good Punjabi-style one (perfect for butter chicken) at Penzeys. If this all sounds too labor-intensive, you can take a real shortcut: Buy a supermarket roasted chicken, skip to the sauce part of our butter chicken recipe, and simmer the pieces in the sauce a few minutes. (We won’t tell anyone!)

But first, perfect easy basmati rice

If you do go with the butter chicken, you’ll probably want rice. I learned to make perfect basmati rice from Jaffrey’s book as well, and you don’t need a formal recipe for it. Rinse 2 cups of basmati rice in several changes of water, cover it with a couple of inches of cold water and let it soak for half an hour. Bring 2 3/4 cups water to boil in an oven-proof pan with a tight-fitting lid. Drain the rice, add it to the boiling water, bring it back to the boil, and then transfer it to a 325-degree oven for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, let it sit (still covered) for 10 minutes, fluff with a fork, and serve.

World Butter Chicken

As for the chicken, I honestly think nothing beats our World Butter Chicken, which streamlines our adaptation of chef Monish Gujral’s recipe from The Moti Mahal Cookbook. (Gujral’s grandfather first created murgh makhani a century ago.) We’re honored that Monish has given his nod of approval to our recipe.

Spices for Garam Masala

Murgh Makhani (Butter Chicken) Feast

World Butter Chicken

Basmati Rice (see above)

Cucumber Raita

Coriander Chutney

Sautéed Spinach with Garlic OR Bahari-Style Peas & Potatoes OR Dakhini Saag (Spinach with Dill)

Garlic or Plain Naan (pick up at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods)

Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

A panoply of plant-based treats

On the other hand, I can’t think of anything more enticing than a gorgeous, aromatic array of Indian vegetarian dishes. It would be super fun to cook up the feast with a friend or two. Or do it as a potluck — any of the dishes listed below should travel just fine. Or just pick two of three of the dishes listed below to keep it more basic.

Another great centerpiece besides saag paneer is the platter of charred baby eggplants shown above, adapted from Anjali Pathak’s The Indian Family Kitchen. A crunchy topping of coconut, mustard seeds, curry leaves and ginger make it really special; fresh red chiles add a zing of heat that gets smoothed out with dabs of yogurt. It’s a fabulous dish.

One of the dishes listed below is a favorite from Madhur Jaffrey’s Vegetarian India: Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings. I make it frequently, sometimes as part of a vegan meal, with lentils, or a vegetarian one, with a rich and buttery dal.

Indian Vegetarian Feast

Anjali Pathak’s Charred Baby Eggplants

Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer OR Dakhini Saag

Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings

Peas and Potatoes, Bihari Style

Cucumber Raita

Coriander Chutney

Basmati Rice (see above) AND/OR Purchased Garlic or Plain Naan

Whichever way you go with your Indian feast — or maybe you’ll just tackle one delicious dish — I wish you a beautiful and most fragrant journey.

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Want to find all of Cooks Without Borders’ Indian recipes in one place? Visit our Indian Cuisine page.

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All the harvest-box greens: How to make the most of kale, chard, collards and the like

Harvest boxes of greens and herbs from La Bajada POP Farm, part of Promise of Peace Gardens, a Dallas-based nonprofit.

Whether it’s from your own garden, the community garden where you’ve been working a plot, the farmers market — or you’ve picked up or ordered a harvest box from a local farm — you suddenly find yourself with armfuls of greens.

I love greens any way I can get them; this time of year and through the winter, I actively crave them. I especially love mustard greens, for their wonderful spiciness, but kale, chard, collards and spinach are wonderful too — and I love to mix them up.

What to do with them?

Sure, you can drop the leaves in a salad. For that, the youngest leaves are best — especially spinach and tangy beet greens. For tougher customers, like kale, a little pre-salad-bowl massage does wonders for mature leaves. Stack them, roll up and slice into chiffonade, then give those ribbons a squeeze before you dress them.

This time of year, soup is front-of-mind. You could make an earthy, vegan, soul-sustaining, feed-you-all-week soup based on lentils, onions, carrot and celery, punctuated by spices and rounded out by all those greens — thrown in at the last minute for maximum flavor and texture.

Here’s a master recipe.

And then there is saag paneer. Did you think the Indian braised greens-and-cheese dish was meant only to include spinach? Actually, in India saag refers to any kinds of greens, as Maneet Chauhan explains in her new cookbook, Chaat. (Read our story about it.) Her version of the classic dish includes kale and arugula along with spinach, but in her headnote she urges inclusion of any greens you’ve got.

Or you could shine a bright spotlight on the greens themselves, making a simple sauté that puts them center stage and celebrates their individual flavors.

During The Great Confinement, Wylie has fashioned himself into the greens specialist of our household. As long as chard (his favorite) is involved, it’s his mission to preside over them and add whatever else looks great. The stems, he feels, are all important. “You’re wasting if you don’t use them,” he says. “That’s not cool. They add texture and emphasize the character of each green. Especially chard.” He slices them into what looks like a small dice, and advocates sautéeing those stems with “some kind of allium,” which for him always includes shallots.

The sautéed stems also give the finished dish a confetti-on-top kind of beauty.

Last week, we purchased a harvest box from a wonderful nonprofit educational farm where we live in Dallas – Promise of Peace Gardens — and we found ourselves in possession of a wealth of gorgeous organic greens: two kinds of kale, rainbow chard and daikon greens.

Kale from our POP Gardens harvest box, with more greens in the background

I convinced Wylie to slow down enough to show me exactly how he achieves his greens greatness.

It starts with sweating shallots in olive oil, then adding garlic, then the toughest sliced stems, then the more tender stems, and then the greens — beginning with the sturdiest (kale and collards, for instance). You add them, and cook till wilted enough to make room for the next batch. Then come the more tender — chard, mustard and/or turnip. And finally the most tender – young arugula, spinach and whatnot. After that, he adds a little chicken broth (vegetable broth or water work fine, too, and keep it vegan), to loosen up the the mix and let it breathe. Finally, off-heat, a dash of vinegar.

They’re super delicious on those evenings when a pot of beans and some brown rice or roasted sweet potatoes feel like healthy luxuries. For omnivores, they’re the perfect minerally counterpoint to something like saucy pork chops, or any kind of roasted or braised meat or poultry. (Duck!)

There you go. If you’ve been hesitating to subscribe to a local farm-box program for fear you’d be awash in stuff you couldn’t use, you have your braising orders.

RECIPE: Sunday Souper Soup

RECIPE: Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer

RECIPE: Wylie’s Greens

Our favorite thing in Maneet Chauhan's new cookbook, 'Chaat': out-of-this-world saag paneer

Chaat, as anyone who knows anything about Indian food knows, is the subcontinent’s vibrant, colorful, tasty culture of snacks. Here’s the way Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy put it in the intro to their new Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets, and Railways of India:

“Chaat are typically snacks or small meals that are tangy and sweet, fiery and crunchy, savory and sour all in one topsy, turvy bite. Some iconic chaat include Bhel Puri, Puchkas, and Aloo Chat.”

As well as being a star of Food Network’s ‘Chopped,’ Chauhan is executive chef of a group of well-known restaurants in Nashville including one specializing in those very street snacks — Chaatable. So I was most excited to dive in and start cooking and snacking, living the chaat life.

Six recipes into my exploration, you may be surprised to learn, my hands-down favorite has not been a chaat like the Mumbai-style Bhel Puri — which was topsy turvy to the extreme, and quite a lot of work once you make the two chutneys involved.

Instead, I went wild for the Saag Paneer — braised greens with farmer cheese. It’s a dish that strikes me not so much as a snack, but more of an unplugged, slow-food, sit-down-to-a-real-meal kind of affair. Especially because Chauhan’s features paneer (that’s the farmer cheese) that you make in your very own kitchen.

In fact, among the myriad pandemic cooking projects I’ve thrown myself into, making that paneer has been one of the most fun and rewarding.

It’s surprisingly easy. Scald milk. Stir in lemon juice. Cover and let it sit 10 minutes. Now it’s curds and whey: ladle them into a cheesecloth-lined sieve set over a bowl.

Curds of paneer in a cheesecloth-lined sieve

Gather up the curds in the cheesecloth and compress. You’ve got cheese. The bowl’s got whey.

Gather up the cheesecloth around the curds, compress, and this is what you’ve got.

Incredible, right?! Now mold it into a rectangle, compress a few minutes, and you’ve got paneer.

The finished paneer

Here’s the Paneer recipe.

You could stop there, that cheese is so lovely. I certainly would have been happy just to eat it as is.

But a handmade paneer really deserves a saag. But wait, what does “saag” even mean?

Whether you’ve made it at home or eaten it a hundred times in Indian restaurants, if you’re not Indian, chances are you think saag means “spinach.” That’s what I had always thought.

Not exactly, Chauhan explains. In India, “saag means any dish made with leafy greens, not just spinach.”

Her exuberantly spiced recipe takes delicious advantage of a full spectrum of greens. As she writes in the headnote to her Saag Paneer recipe:

“In Jharkhand saag dishes often include a variety of leafy greens that are indigenous to the region. In Nashville, I like to whip up this easy recipe on days when I need a reboot, packing it with a variety of greens I consume not only for their flavor but for their nutritional benefits. . . . Feel free to stick to the more common saag paneer recipe, swapping in spinach for the arugula and kale, but if you’re feeling adventurous, pack this recipe with healthful virtue by adding in as many greens as you can get your hands on.”

She suggests collards, carrot tops, beet greens, chard or bok choy leaves. “The possibilities are endless.”

I made it exactly as written in the recipe, melting ghee in a pan, adding spices, ginger-garlic paste and minced serrano chiles, then giant handfuls of arugula, baby kale and baby spinach. You cook those until they’re wilted, let it simmer a minute, blitz it all in a food processor, add lemon juice, put it back in the pan, then reheat and gently stir in cubes of paneer.

To serve, Chauhan has you drizzle the Saag Paneer with more melted ghee, garnish it with cilantro, serve it with basmati rice and chapatis. (I skipped the chapatis, and no one was the wiser.)

It’s absolutely wonderful: earthy from all those greens, aromatic with deeply layered spices (cardamom, cumin, mustard seeds) and luxuriously rich with the ghee and delicately melting, tender and marvelous paneer. That paneer is nothing like that rubbery stuff you usually find even in pretty good Indian restaurants and Indian groceries.

What else did I love in the book? So far, a quick and easy Tibetan chicken-noodle soup, Thukpa, which Chauhan recalls first tasting in a train station in Guwahati on a cold winter’s day. We’ll be featuring it soon in our series “Around the World in Chicken Soup.” (Here’s Part I, starring Brazilian canja de galinha; here’s Part II, in which Jenn Louis’ Chicken Soup Manifesto treats us to Ethiopian Ye Ocholoni Ina Doro Shorba.)

I’ll be continuing to explore the chaat in Chauhan and Eddy’s book, many of which are pretty involved. In the meantime, I highly recommend the engaging volume, which is a great, fun, illuminating read, filled with invaluable cultural intelligence from all over delicious India.

RECIPE: Paneer (Fresh Indian Cheese)

RECIPE: Maneet Chauhan’s Saag Paneer

Chaat: Recipes from the Kitchens, Markets, and Railways of India, by Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy, CLARKSON Potter, $32.50.

Celebrate World Butter Chicken Day with the real thing — made quicker, easier and lip-smackingly delicious

Earlier this year — just before The Great Confinement — I became obsessed with butter chicken, and in April tracked down the Delhi-based chef, Monish Gujral, whose grandfather invented the dish.

Since then, I’ve normalized my relationship to the dish, which has taken its place in our home as a favorite for those times when we crave easy-to-conjure comfort that also transports.

READ: “Obsessed with butter chicken: Our recipe follows the world’s favorite Indian dish faithfully back to its origin”

Following the conversations chef Gujral and I had about the dish and its history in April, we have stayed in touch, and in September he texted to say that Moti Mahal — the restaurant where Kundan Lal Gujral invented butter chicken — would soon be celebrating its 100 year anniversary. It opened in October 1920.

I suggested he proclaim the appropriate date in October to be World Butter Chicken Day, to be celebrated every year. After all, butter chicken is no doubt the most popular Indian dish in the universe. It needs a food holiday! The exact date of Moti Mahal’s founding is unknown, so Gujral chose October 20, the birthday of his own son, who Monish says “looks like his great-grandfather,” Kundan Lal.

Monish Gujral, with tandoori chicken — which his grandfather, Kundan Lal Gujral, invented | Photo courtesy of Moti Mahal

So there you have it: this coming Tuesday, October 20 will be the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day. (A bit of research led me to understand that’s how these food holidays get created: Someone simply creates them, and they either catch on or they don’t.) 

#WorldButterChickenDay is an auspicious day, of course, to enjoy murgh makhani (butter chicken in Hindi), salute its origin — and (it struck us both) make a tax-deductible contribution to the United Nations’ World Food Programme or other nonprofit organization fighting global hunger.

With all the excitement around murgh makhani and its origins, it has also felt like the moment to revisit our Ultimate Butter Chicken recipe, my adaptation of Gujral’s original. Keeping as close as practicable to his recipe, published in his 2009 book, Moti Mahal: On the Butter Chicken Trail (later re-published in as On the Butter Chicken Trail, Ultimate Butter Chicken has been the gold-standard murgh makhani in our kitchen. However, it requires four hours of marination, leading me on occasion to reach instead for Urvashi Pitre’s excellent Instant Pot version.

That said, for all the ease and quickness of Pitre’s recipe, which gets to the table in 30 minutes, it sometimes leaves me missing the depth of flavor that marinated-then-roasted chicken — more like tandoori chicken — brings to the dish. (For the Instant Pot version, raw chicken is pressure-cooked in the sauce components.)

Back into the test kitchen I went, playing with murgh makhani, and I’m excited to debut a new, greatly simplified version: World Butter Chicken. It’s much much quicker to execute than Gujral’s excellent version, and if my extremely critical family is to be believed, it’s every bit as wonderful.

The secret of the recipe is compressing the original two-step, four-hour marination into a one-and-a-half step one-hour marination. The resulting chicken tandoori thighs are perhaps even better than the first iteration; I’d be thrilled to eat them even without the sumptuous butter chicken sauce.

Nipping three hours out of the marination time means it’s on the table in 90 minutes or less, an hour of which is unattended marinating time. That’s when you can make the cucumber raita and coriander chutney that are great to serve with it, and get basmati rice ready to cook. While the chicken thighs roast (20 to 35 minutes depending on their size), you can make the sauce and the rice. 

Congratulations to Moti Mahal on its first hundred years, and many thanks to Monish Gujral and his family for the gift of murgh makhani.

Happy World Butter Chicken Day!

RECIPE: World Butter Chicken

Obsessed with butter chicken: Our recipe follows the world’s favorite Indian dish faithfully back to its origin

The ultimate murgh makhani — also known as butter chicken

Several months before The Great Confinement, I became obsessed with butter chicken.  

It began with a problem I needed to solve for a client, for which an Instant Pot seemed like a possible solution. Never having used one, I Googled — and found a nearly two-year-old New Yorker profile of one Urvashi Pitre, “The ‘Butter Chicken Lady’ Who Made Indian Cooks Love the Instant Pot.”

Butter chicken? I’d never given the dish much thought — always assumed it was an Indian dish concocted for American tastes, as chicken tikka masala is for the Brits.

How wrong I was. And how silly I felt, and still feel — mostly because of the missed opportunities to indulge in murgh makhani (butter chicken’s proper name) during a lifetime enjoying Indian food. 

Meanwhile, if exemplary butter chicken could be easily achieved at home in less than a half hour using an Instant Pot, well, then, I had to get an Instant Pot.

My young-adult son Wylie was living with us at the time. Though suspicious of the plug-in-pot contraption, he’d always been partial to the charms of butter chicken, so he was keen to give the recipe a whirl for dinner one weeknight. It was remarkably easy: You put nearly all the ingredients — chicken pieces, a can of diced tomatoes, spices and salt — in the Instant Pot and turn it on. Then you pull out the chicken, use a stick blender to blitz the sauce, swirl in butter, cream, more spice and cilantro, put the chicken back in, and that’s it. Wylie started prepping everything just as I was leaving my office to head home; when I walked in 20 minutes later, he was swirling in the cream.

Wylie’s first (Instant Pot!) butter chicken. Delicious — and so easy!

The Instant Pot butter chicken was astonishingly good: rich, nicely spiced, altogether satisfying. And in so little time, with so little effort. Bravo Urvashi Pitre! 

Urvashi Pitre, a.k.a. the Butter Chicken Lady, with her instant pot murgh makhani in Southlake, Texas

Now I wanted to meet the famous Butter Chicken Lady — who happens to live not 25 minutes from me. I had the perfect opportunity. Another one of my clients, in process of opening a new store and cafe in Southlake, Texas, asked me to recommend a local cooking personality for the store’s inaugural Supper Club series. The Butter Chicken Lady! The event was an instant sell-out, and the guests (some of whom flew in from other states) loved it. What a kick to dine on delicious murgh makhani seated literally next to the extremely delightful Butter Chicken Lady. (Check out her excellent blog, Two Sleevers, where you’ll find hundreds of quick-and-easy recipes.) 

Meanwhile, I was getting curiouser and curiouser about murgh makhani. What were the origins of the dish? Were they knowable, or, like most dishes, something with hazy beginnings, a dish that evolved over eons? Would other versions include onions, which were conspicuously absent from Urvashi’s version?

The simplicity of the answer to the origin question threw me for a loop: Butter chicken — murgh makhani — was created, according to a 2018 Washington Post story, in the late 1920’s or early ‘30s in Peshawar (then India, now Pakistan) by a chef named Kundan Lal Gujral. It’s exceedingly rare that a dish has origins so precisely knowable, but butter chicken’s origin story is uncontested, the smart story by Andreas Viestad asserted.

I found the piece just as I was headed to Massachussetts to visit Juliet, a brilliant web designer (and gifted cook) who is now my partner in Cooks Without Borders. As we drove from the airport to her house, I told her about the Post piece, which profiles Monish Gujral, the grandson of Kundan Lal — who also created (incredibly!) tandoori chicken. His grandfather had wanted to create a dish for his mentor that was lighter than the usual dishes of the region, so he had the wacky idea of roasting a chicken in a tandoor oven, which at the time had normally only been used for baking bread. Tandoori chicken was a hit that put the restaurant — Moti Mahal — on the map, and later Kundan Lal created butter chicken as a way to use leftover tandoori chickens. Bathed in a rich, tomatoey, buttery, beautifully spiced sauce, murgh makhani made Moti Mahal famous throughout India. After partition in 1947 (when Pakistan and India were separated), Kundan Lal moved to Delhi, where he opened his own Moti Mahal. His grandson Monish apprenticed with him, becoming a chef at Moti Mahal after graduating university, and eventually taking over the family business — now an empire of some 250 restaurants.

Having eyeballed the WaPo adaptation of Gujral’s recipe, I thought it looked remarkably quick and easy — maybe even as quick to put together as Urvashi’s Instant Pot version. “Let’s make it!” said Juliet. Leave it to my friend to have all the ingredients already on hand.

The WaPo adaptation had us quick-roast pseudo-tandoori chicken pieces in the oven, having slathered on a yogurt-and-spice coating, but not leaving it to marinate before roasting. The sauce came together quickly on the stovetop.

The butter chicken Juliet and I made from the Washington Post story.

Again, this was delicious — perfect for a flavor-happy weeknight dinner.

But I couldn’t help but wonder how close this was to the original; the tandoori-approximation seemed a bit quick and clipped, and did the dish maybe want a little more depth?

Monish Gujral’s book, On the Butter Chicken Trail, offers a recipe slightly different than the adaptation in the WaPo piece. It calls for making an actual tandoori chicken first, marinating a skinless chicken first in lime juice, chile powder and salt, and then in a yogurt-spice blend — for at least four hours altogether, so all those flavors soaked in — then skewering the soaked bird and roasting it in a tandoor oven or grill.

Most cooks I know do not have a tandoor, and grilling isn’t always an option, but those two marinades seemed very worthwhile, and I wanted to do something a bit closer to the original than the WaPo recipe. Chicken thighs strike me as more practical for most American cooks, always flavorful, of course, and easier to cook evenly in high oven heat than a skinless whole chicken. Our recipe calls for roasting the thighs on a rack over a baking sheet so the pieces don’t braise in all the juices that collect otherwise.

[EDITOR’S NOTE Oct. 19, 2020: In honor of the first-ever World Butter Chicken Day, October 20, 2020, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of Moti Mahal, we have published a new story and created a new, streamlined version of our recipe. The new version is called World Butter Chicken.]

I also adapted the wonderful garam masala Gujral uses, which gives the dish a gorgeous aromatic underpinning. (The recipe for garam masala in Gurjal’s book yields nearly a pound of spice mix — more than most cooks I know would use in a lifetime; I scaled it down to a twelfth of that.)

Kundan Lal Gujral, the creator of murgh makhani — a.k.a. butter chicken. Gujral also is credited with with creating tandoori chicken. Photo courtesy of Monish Gujral.

Finally, while Gurjal’s recipe calls for 14 medium-sized ripe red tomatoes, that is an awful lot of tomato for one chicken; one 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes seemed and tasted like the right amount, and canned tomatoes are more practical outside of tomato season.

That left me with one question: While the WaPo recipe called for Kashmiri chili powder, with 2/3 paprika and 1/3 cayenne offered as a sub, the recipe in the book called for “red chilli powder” without specifying a type. I tested it with the paprika and cayenne combo, and that seemed perfect. But what was ideal — and how much does it matter?

I went straight to the source, and asked Gurjal, whom I had no trouble finding through Facebook.

Now I was just beside myself — first I got to meet the Butter Chicken Lady, and now I was corresponding with the Butter Chicken King himself! Juliet pointed out that he was really more like the Butter Chicken Prince, as he was descended from the dish’s creator, but to me the fact of his world-wide murgh makhani empire makes him the Butter Chicken King.

Gurjal clarified the red chile powder question: Kashmiri chile powder, or a commercial blend called Deggi Mirch (a powder of Kashmiri chiles and red bell peppers), or the paprika-cayenne alternative work well. I sent him my adaptation of his recipe pre-publication, we discussed the switch to canned diced tomatoes and my adaptation of his garam masala, and he approved of the whole package. He was careful to add that you don’t want to blend the sauce too fine; you want it to have a bit of nice texture.

When we chatted later on the phone, he told me about his two grown children (his daughter is a lawyer at the High Court in Delhi; his son is in law school in London). “When they’ve been away and they come home,” he said, “right away, they always want butter chicken.”

Of course they do. It may well be the world’s most beguiling comfort food.

RECIPE: The Ultimate Butter Chicken

Cookbook review: A delicious passage with Madhur Jaffrey to Vegetarian India

It has been quite a rich publishing season for cookbooks that appeal to border-busting food-lovers, and when a review copy of Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking landed in my mailbox, I could hardly wait to get cooking.  Jaffrey has legions of fans and admirers – seven of her books have won James Beard Awards. As soon as I started cooking from this one, I remembered why I'm such a fan: Her recipes are simple, they're delicious and they work. There wasn't a single problem in the three recipes I tested. The only tweaks I've made is calling for a medium-sized roasting pan or baking dish for the cauliflower, which would have gotten lost in the larger pan the book called for, and adding a note to adjust the seasoning in the recipe for spinach with dill, which wanted a little more salt.

If you buy Vegetarian India, take the time to read Jaffrey's introduction, which takes you on a mini-tour of vegetarian India: She traveled all around the vast country collecting recipes – from Uttar Pradesh and Benghal to Bombay and Hyderabad and back – for vegetarian dishes "that are both delicious and easy to make." So many things to discover here: dishes, regions, styles, ingredients. I'm particularly curious about poha, flattened and dried rice that's pre-cooked. Jaffrey raves about it, providing a number of recipes for it, including one with ginger-flavored green beans that sounds wonderful.

I love the way she wraps things up: "In India's ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine," she writes, "it is believed that the simple acts of cutting and chopping and stirring are graces that can bring you peace and calm. That is what I wish for you."

For me, Jaffrey's wish came true: I spent a glorious afternoon toasting and grinding and grating spices, which filled my kitchen with wonderful exotic aromas – ginger and coriander and cumin. "Whatever you're doing," said my husband, led by his nose to the kitchen, "it's going to be delicious." Thanks to Jaffrey, he was right.

Flipping through the book, which includes more than 200 recipes and beautiful photos by Jonathan Gregson, it wasn't hard to find three dishes I wanted to jump into: Everything looked and sounded so delicious. I chose Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings (Oven Ki Gobi), Peas and Potatoes Cooked in a Bihari Style (Matar Ki Ghugni) and Spinach with Dill (Dakhini Saag). All were terrific, definitely going into my repertoire.

Next time I cook from it, I'll heed Jaffrey's advice about menu planning: "Indian meals are always put together so they are nutritionally balanced: a grain is always served with a vegetable and a dairy product, not only because they taste good together but also because together they are nutritionally complete." This time around I hadn't chosen anything involving dairy. The ingredients were easy to find in my regular supermarket, the instructions were clear and the amounts and times were spot-on.

Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $35.