Butter Chicken

I have been making Better Butter Chicken out of the Eat, Shrink, and Be Merry (ESBM) cookbook for months. But at the request of my cousin Sarah, I started looking for another butter chicken recipe that didn't use any premade sauces or marinades. The recipe from ESBM uses bottled tandoori marinade on the chicken and the rest is from scratch. But this new recipe uses nothing premade which is preferable to me as who needs the extra sodium and preservatives found in the store bought stuff?

I found this recipe for Butter Chicken on the Tasty Kitchen website. It is an off shoot of Pioneer Woman's website which is my new "first stop" when looking for new recipes :)

It starts with cutting boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or your cut of choice) into 1 inch cubes and marinating them for 30 minutes - 24 hours. The marinade is simple.....

Just cumin, ginger, salt, and yogurt. The recipe calls for "Greek plain yogurt" but I couldn't find anything like that in Safeway so I went with Lucerne instead :)

The chicken cubes went for a little swim in the marinade. My intention was to cook them an hour later but life had other plans for me and I didn't get to them for 24 hours. this turned out to be a good thing as the meat became very tender with the extra time to marinate.

To save on clean up time, and let's be honest, we all want to save on clean up time.... I lined the baking sheet with foil before lining up the chicken cubes for baking. These went in the oven at 350 for 30 minutes.

Now is a good time to start the sauce. If you start the sauce within about 10 minutes of the chicken going in the oven you will find that when the chicken is done it will be the right time in the recipe to stir it into the sauce.

We start the sauce by sauteeing an onion in a tablespoon of oil. I sliced this onion using a food processor. Ah, I love my food processor. It never makes me cry when slicing an onion :)

The next step is mixing in some spices. But instead of taking a picture of the jars like I normally do (yawn) I measured them into this cute little bowl. There are six spices here, can you guess what they are?

(insert the theme music from Jeopardy! here)

Time's up. How many did you get right? :)

Here are the spices mixed with the sauteed onions. This step looks disgusting but smells wonderful. The butter chicken spices are starting make the whole kitchen smell like "Bombay Sweet House" (best Indian food in Calgary! If you are ever in north east Calgary make a point of stopping there for some butter chicken, naan, and any one of their many desserts).

Canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and chicken have been added now. All that's missing is a little heavy cream and butter for some added richness. Although this could possibly be skipped for a healthier version.

With ESBM's version I take about 1/2 of the mixture and mix it in the blender just before adding the chicken. This results in a smoother overall texture. However, this version was quite smooth and didn't require that extra step.

And here's the final product. A little salad and wild rice completes the meal.

Now, I've got to say, compared to ESBM's version, this was creamier and tastier and really was no more difficult than the version using the bottled marinade.

But beware, this version is deceptively spicy. If you are serving it to children or people who don't like spicy foods make sure you have some extra yogurt on hand to dilute it. You could also rinse the marinade off the chicken before baking it but if you take too much off you risk removing too much flavor from the whole dish. And some people like full flavor :)

When I make this again I will try adjusting the last step. Instead of adding heavy cream and butter I'll try substituting half n half for the heavy cream and skip the butter all together. But other than that I like the recipe just as it is. It gets two big thumbs up from the foodiestudent! :)