Butter Chicken

History

Butter chicken has a birth address: the Moti Mahal restaurant in Delhi, in the years following the 1947 partition. Kundan Lal Gujral, a refugee from Peshawar, served tandoori chicken there that dried out quickly once it left the oven. His frugal cook’s fix was to give unsold pieces a second life in a sauce of tomatoes, butter, and cream. Murgh makhani, “butter chicken,” was born from a leftovers problem.

The dish circled the globe within a generation, becoming the entry point into Indian food for millions of people. It’s often confused with chicken tikka masala, its British cousin born later in the Indian kitchens of the UK: same family, but butter chicken is milder, more tomato-forward, and richer with butter. The traditional butter chicken recipe actually starts the same way a tandoori dish would, with a marinade and a hard sear.

Ingredients — Serves 4

• 700 g boneless chicken thighs
• Marinade: 150 g yogurt, 1 tbsp ginger-garlic paste, 1 tsp garam masala, paprika, lemon
• Sauce: 600 g ripe tomatoes (or canned chopped tomatoes), 60 g butter, 150 ml cream
• 1 tbsp tomato paste plus 1 tsp garam masala plus a pinch of dried fenugreek leaves (kasuri methi)
• Sugar or honey (1 tsp), salt, basmati rice or naan for serving

Step-by-Step Butter Chicken Recipe

1. Marinate the chicken for at least 2 hours, ideally overnight.
2. Sear it hard under the broiler or in a pan: it should pick up dark, almost charred spots in places. That’s the memory of the tandoor.
3. Make the sauce: simmer the tomatoes with the tomato paste for 15 minutes, then blend until very smooth and pass through a sieve. This is where the sauce earns its silkiness.
4. Finish with butter, returning the sauce to low heat, adding garam masala, crushed fenugreek, sugar, and salt.
5. Combine the chicken and sauce, simmer 10 minutes, then stir in the cream off the heat.
6. Serve with rice or naan and a swirl of cream on top. The sauce should coat the spoon like velvet.

Cooking Method

Technique: a hard tandoori-style sear, followed by a short simmer in a butter-finished sauce.

Traditional equipment: a tandoor oven for the chicken; at home, an oven broiler on full power or a cast-iron pan.

What to look for: a sauce that’s a deep orange, smooth and glossy; dried fenugreek added right at the end is the aromatic signature that marks a real makhani.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, divided across four servings, not counting rice or naan.

At 655 kcal per serving, most of that comes from fat rather than carbohydrate: 51 g, of which 24 g is saturated, driven by the butter and cream that give the dish its name and its texture. Protein, at 36 g, comes from the marinated, hard-seared chicken thighs. Carbohydrate is very low, at 9 g, before rice or naan — a plain naan adds roughly 260 kcal and 48 g of carbs on top of the figures above.

Economic context

Butter chicken began as a way to avoid waste — unsold tandoori chicken given a second life in a rich sauce — rather than as an aspirational dish, though the cream and butter it’s built on today put it above the everyday staples that make up the figure below. It has since become India’s most internationally recognizable curry, exported through restaurant menus well beyond what its frugal kitchen origins would suggest.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. This figure describes the cost of a healthy diet in India generally — it is not a costing of this specific recipe.

Who this dish suits

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