Beyond butter and chicken
You don’t forget some food experiences. I vividly recall a dish my niece had ordered for us from an eatery popular with the young in the Delhi University area. This is a surprise, she announced — and then went on to unpack the dish she was drooling over: butter chicken pasta. I was a bit sceptical, but after my first forkful, I realised it wasn’t bad at all. Butter chicken, I later reasoned, comes in a gravy that has all the ingredients that a good pasta sauce revels in: butter, cream and tomatoes.
Butter chicken, it must be said, is a pan-Indian dish. I remember attending two close friends’ wedding in Guwahati, and hoping that there would be some interesting Assamese dishes at the feast. But it was butter chicken that occupied the high table, mainly because the Assamese guests wanted that — and not what was for them an everyday dish like tenga masor (fish curry)! On another occasion, I went for what I thought would be a good Maharashtrian lunch to the state house in Delhi, and found butter chicken on the menu.
The dish didn’t appeal to me when I was introduced to it several decades back. But I prepared it at home on a couple of occasions, and realised that it could be tweaked to meet different requirements: add more tomatoes when needed, temper it with some fresh black peppercorn for friends who like the flavour, or even add a bit of celery to give it a new twist. For those who baulk at the thought of too much cream and butter, I replace the cream with whipped yogurt. And that works too.
Food snobs tend to turn up their collective noses at the mention of the dish, but there is much to be said about this much-maligned curry. You can play with it as much as you wish to, without taking away its soul. Just last week, to mark a special birthday, a friend had ordered butter chicken buns from a popular confectioner’s in Delhi NCR. There were some succulent pieces of butter chicken in the bun.
On another occasion, I was served butter chicken momos. And those weren’t bad at all, for the thick gravy that oozed out of the dumplings gave it both flavour and a saucy texture.
I like the story that the dish comes enveloped in. It is said that a popular Delhi restaurant had leftover tandoori chicken. A chef sauteed it in butter, and added some tomato puree, cream and a paste of nuts to enhance the flavours. And butter chicken was born. One of the reasons why the dish is such a hit, of course, is that the colours are vibrant. But butter chicken can be lightly tinged, too. Baba’s, a restaurant chain that now has outlets in Delhi NCR, serves a light lemon-hued butter chicken which is as good-looking as it is tasty. A chef there tells me it is largely prepared without tomatoes.
A wizard called Aslam in Old Delhi serves a tomato-less butter chicken recipe that is as sinful as it is delicious. He grills the chicken, and adds some yogurt, cream and spices to it. In a saucepan, dollops of butter bubble away on a stove. Before serving, he pours melted butter over the chicken. I don’t know what it does to your arteries, but I do know this — you keep coming back for more. Clearly, there is more to butter chicken than just, well, butter and chicken. Ever had butter chicken soup? Don’t dismiss it till you try it.
Tasla butter chicken
Ingredients
Chicken (cut into pieces) 1 kg
For the marinade
- Black pepper (ground) 1 tsp
- Turmeric powder 1/4 tsp
- Juice of lemon 1
- White pepper 1 tsp
- Yellow chillies 1 tsp
- Garam masala 1 tsp
- Chaat masala 1 tsp
- Garlic-ginger paste 1 tbsp
- Salt To taste
- Oil For frying
For the sauce
- Cream 1 cup or 200g
- Yogurt ½ cup
- Chaat masala ¼ tsp
- Black pepper powder ½ tsp
- Salt To taste
For the topping
- Butter 50g
Method
— The writer is a food critic
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