Butter chicken was improvised at Moti Mahal in Delhi’s Daryaganj around 1950, when its owner Kundan Lal Gujral — a Peshawar restaurateur who had brought his tandoor to Delhi at Partition — looked for a way to rescue the day’s unsold tandoori chicken before it dried hard in the heat of the oven. He folded the leftover pieces into a gravy of fresh tomatoes, butter and cream, mellow enough to carry the smoke of the tandoor rather than fight it, and murgh makhani was born. The dish travelled from a single Daryaganj counter to Nehru’s table and outward across the world; its parentage is now guarded so fiercely that two Delhi restaurants are fighting over it in the High Court. This is one dish we haven’t taken from a home kitchen or a forum: there is no more faithful source than the recipe the inventing family published themselves, so the version here follows the Gujral cookbook. It is built, as the original was, on fresh tomatoes cooked down and sieved to a smooth gravy — butter chicken is, before anything else, tandoori chicken given a second life.
INGREDIENTS
- 800 g boneless chicken thigh (cut into large pieces)
- 4 tbsp plain yogurt
- 2 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tsp Kashmiri red chilli powder
- 1½ tsp garam masala
- 1½ tsp salt
- 3 tbsp neutral oil (for grilling)
- 60 g unsalted butter
- 1 large onion (finely chopped)
- 6 ripe tomatoes (roughly chopped (or 400g tinned tomatoes))
- 4 green cardamom pods
- 4 cloves
- 1 small cinnamon stick
- 2 green chillies (slit)
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 tbsp kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves, crushed)
- 100 ml double cream (plus a swirl to serve)
METHOD
- Mix the chicken with the yogurt, half the ginger-garlic paste, lemon juice, 1 tsp of the Kashmiri chilli, 1 tsp garam masala and 1 tsp salt, and marinate at least 1 hour, ideally overnight.
- Spread the chicken on a tray and grill close to a hot element — or sear in a smoking-hot pan with the oil — until the edges char and blacken in places, 8–10 minutes; set aside.
- In a wide pan, melt half the butter, add the cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, and let them sizzle a few seconds.
- Add the onion and remaining ginger-garlic paste and cook until soft and pale gold, 6–8 minutes.
- Add the tomatoes, green chillies and remaining salt, and cook down 12–15 minutes until fully collapsed.
- Fish out the whole spices, blend the gravy smooth, then pass it through a sieve back into the pan for the signature velvet texture.
- Stir in the remaining Kashmiri chilli and garam masala, the sugar and kasuri methi, and simmer 5 minutes.
- Add the grilled chicken with any resting juices and simmer 8–10 minutes until the sauce clings.
- Take off the heat, swirl in the cream and remaining butter, and serve with naan or jeera rice.
