Better Stovetop Butter Chicken
[Photographs: Vicky Wasik]
Butter chicken is inherently delicious—even in its most streamlined and simplified form, it’s tasty. But with just a little more effort, it becomes superlative. The goal of this recipe is to hit all the characteristic notes of butter chicken—mildly spiced tomato-based sauce; tender, charred chicken pieces; a mother’s love’s worth of butter and cream folded in at the end—while developing flavor at every turn. It may be a little more complicated than just placing all the ingredients in a pressure cooker and then blending them, like some other, very popular butter chicken recipes, but the extra effort is worth it.
Still, this recipe isn’t difficult, despite the long ingredient list. The yogurt marinade for the chicken comes together in seconds, and while toasting and grinding whole spices improve their flavor and aroma considerably, you can use pre-ground spices for a small tradeoff in flavor. It may seem complicated to cook the chicken and sauce separately, but the reality is that it’s dead easy, and the extra flavor you get from that char is absolutely worth it. For the sake of clarity, the recipe was broken up into two parts, but the chicken can be broiled as the sauce simmers, then set aside as you finish the sauce.
This is a stovetop adaptation of our pressure cooker butter chicken recipe, which you can refer to for the full recipe-testing notes. While this recipe takes about 40 minutes longer to prepare than the pressure cooker version, most of that time is hands-off, and the flavor is even better than the already-great pressure-cooked version.
Published at Thu, 05 Mar 2020 10:28:48 +0000
