Scratch-Made Butter Chicken and Naan

A few years ago, we took all of our younger cousins out to the Museum of Science and Technology. On our way home, we swung by the Indian Express and picked up some butter chicken and naan to eat at a park. At a later date, AU and EU both helped me make butter chicken from scratch.

Since then, AU and EU have repeatedly asked me if we can make butter chicken again.  They were in luck. I went grocery shopping and picked up some ingredients to make naan and butter chicken.

EU was very enthusiastic and wanted to be in charge of the naan making, so I supervised him as he measured out the ingredients to Life Tastes Good’s Home-made Naan recipe. We doubled the recipe since we had nine mouths to feed. The dough was allowed to rest for an hour. The following recipes are the approximate values that we added…

Homemade Naan

4 cups all purpose flour

1½ tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

1 cup milk

1 cup non-sweetened yogurt

1 tsp sugar

¼ tsp salt

After half an hour, I began making the butter chicken. I accidently bought bone-in chicken thighs, so instead of trimming the chicken, marinating the trimmed chicken, then cooking it, I just boiled the chicken pieces. EU and KG then tore the chicken into bite-sized pieces. The chicken was set aside to cool, while I taught EU and AU how to roll out the dough and cook the naan on a lightly-oiled medium-high heated pan. AU cooked the naan until they were golden and transferred them onto two plates. The plates of cooked naan were put in the cold oven to stay warm while I prepared the butter chicken.

For the butter chicken, I had The Independent’s Easy Butter Chicken recipe on my laptop screen. Although the recipe isn’t complicated, I wanted to simplify the recipe since we didn’t have everything listed.

Simplified Butter Chicken

8 chicken thighs (boneless)

3 medium hot house tomatoes

Handful of small cherry tomatoes (grown from Aunt IS’ garden)

2 tbsp roughly chopped, ginger

1 clove roughly chopped, garlic

2 tsp sugar

Tandoori masala, sour cream to taste

2 tbsp non-salted butter

Tomatoes, garlic, ginger were sautéed with a bit of butter. Andrew used our immersion blender and puréed the lot. Tandoori masala and sour cream were added to the mix. I just kept tasting it and adjusting on the fly. When it finally tasted good, I asked the kids to set the table and to call everyone in the house to come eat dinner.

As everyone trickled into the kitchen, the two platefuls of naan were taken out of the oven, and the naan were briefly toasted in the toaster oven. Garlic cloves were minced and warmed up briefly in the microwave with some butter. This garlic butter was to turn the naan into garlic naan.

Just before everyone was served, chunks of non-salted butter were mixed into the butter chicken to complete the dish.

Everyone got Jasmine rice, naan, butter chicken, and a glass of ginger ale for dinner. The spiciness of the butter chicken snowballed. The more we ate, the spicier it got. I added a bit too much tandoori masala. Despite this, the tangy sour cream tamed the spicy garam masala really well. Most of us liked it spicy.

The rice would've tasted much better if we cooked it with cardamom seeds and coconut milk.

The homemade naan wasn’t as light and fluffy as I had hoped. They were thick and bland, but not dense. However, the naan was a perfect vehicle for butter chicken consumption. It did an amazing job of mopping up the all the flavoursome butter chicken sauce.

We ended up eating half of the pot for dinner and would've had a lot of leftovers for the following day, but Andrew and KG ended up eating most of the leftovers for their midnight snack. The rest was finished in the early morning by the early risers. I guess good things just don't last very long.