How NYC’s Best Butter Chicken is Made

[instrumental music]

Hey guys, I'm Chintan Kiran Pandya.

I'm at Adda right now.

This is our newest restaurant

in the Lower East Side, New York City,

and this is Chef Gurmehr.

And today we are gonna be doing the perfect version

of our butter chicken.

At Adda, we do a butter chicken experience,

which is only six tables a night,

and it's a tableside butter chicken

which is cooked as per your taste.

So everybody who dines at our restaurant

might end up eating a different version

of butter chicken every night.

So today we are doing a conventional,

traditional butter chicken.

So the word is butter chicken.

In India, we call it murgh makhani.

The word murgh means chicken,

and makhani basically means something that is butter.

Don't be scared of adding butter and cream into this dish.

As the name suggests, it's a butter chicken.

So if you are on a diet or a health-conscious person,

I would still say break your diet for a day,

add that extra butter.

Butter makes everything better.

[soft instrumental music]

One part about marinating the chicken,

or marinating any kind of meat, vegetables,

or anything in Indian food,

is it's broken down into two parts.

The first marination is

we add in purely certain flavors into the meat.

It'll start oozing out water from the meat.

Then we drain out the water,

and then we have the actual other marinade,

which is a yogurt-based marinade.

The reason we do it is

once chicken loses that certain amount of moisture,

and when we do it with the yogurt, it coats it better

instead of losing the moisture directly.

For the first marination, I have some chicken over here,

which is the raw chicken thigh meat.

I'm just gonna add some ginger-garlic paste.

And the ginger-garlic paste

is to actually break down the, you know, protein into it.

Gonna add some red chili powder.

You add the red chili powder because it needs that flavor,

it needs that little color to it.

So I'm just gonna add some salt inside it.

What will happen after a period of 45 minutes to one hour,

you'll see a certain amount of moisture which has come out.

What you need to do after is just take this up

and drain the moisture out of it.

First marination is just to infuse those flavors

and take a little moisture out of the chicken.

Now we move on to our second marination.

So we have some mustard oil over there.

We are gonna heat it up.

Mustard oil actually imparts a deeper flavor to it

and actually gives a better taste profile to it.

So you need to heat up the mustard oil

till the smoking point

and then get it down to room temperature.

One of the reasons we smoke it up

is to cut down on the pungency

and bitterness in the mustard oil to make it milder,

so that it doesn't overpower the final taste of the dish

that you're doing.

So now it's smoking.

We are gonna shut it off.

As you can see, even the density of the oil has changed now.

Just let it cool down.

Just gonna add in a little red chili powder,

and you should just mix it.

I'm gonna add this garam masala powder,

which is a homemade garam masala powder.

You can also buy it store-bought.

The word masala means spice.

The word garam means hot in this case,

but it's not a hot spice, it's just a blend of spices.

Every household in India, every mother in India,

will make a different version of garam masala,

and that is the perfect version for them.

It is what you like as a garam masala.

You can add in the ingredients and everything.

You can add in some ginger-garlic paste to it.

So for the entire recipe,

where we're using ginger-garlic paste, it's 50-50.

I'm gonna add in a little salt to it.

Now we have yogurt over here.

One kind of yogurt that we use normally

is called hung yogurt.

Basically, you make your own yogurt,

pass it through a muslin, keep it overnight,

and you get this thick yogurt out of it,

which is called hung yogurt.

If you are doing it at home

and don't want to do a hung yogurt,

just use a full-fat Greek yogurt.

What happens with a full-fat yogurt

is the yogurt is very thick

and it'll coat your chicken properly.

You can use a whisk to do your thing,

but I prefer doing it by hand

because I feel that I mix it better

and I have more control over it.

It's looking great.

It's looking thick.

You want the chicken to be coated with it.

If it's thin, it'll not coat it properly.

You need this thing where it's full-fat

and it's not thin, that kind of consistency.

I'm gonna make two kinds of chicken.

One is boneless, one is bone-in.

If I'm eating as a consumer, I would go with the bone-in.

Anything with the bone will always taste much better.

It'll have a deeper taste to it, more juiciness to it,

and the bone adds a lot of complexity to the dish itself.

When you go to a restaurant in India,

you can order either one of them, what you like.

I'm just gonna add the marination to it.

It's just gonna keep it inside the refrigerator

for them to marinate, minimum two hours, ideally overnight.

So we're gonna move everything

and now start working on the sauce

as our chicken is getting marinated,

and then we'll get everything together.

[upbeat music]

So we are gonna make the sauce.

The name of the sauce is makhani.

Everybody thinks when we name the word butter chicken,

the two most important ingredients

is butter and the chicken,

but it also has a third important ingredient to it,

which forms the actual base of the sauce,

and that's the tomatoes.

I'm looking for some good ripe tomatoes

which are sweet in taste.

This is a very simple step in making a gravy.

Just wanna dump everything in.

I have some ginger-garlic paste.

I'm just gonna add some sliced garlic over here.

A little bit of red chili powder.

I'm just gonna add in a little fat to it right now.

So I'm adding a little butter.

A lot of people also end up adding oil

or something at this stage.

I prefer adding butter.

I'm gonna add in some cardamom seeds over here.

So actually, with cardamom, the real taste is in the seeds.

This is just the outer covering actually.

And these are the seeds, that's where the actual flavor is.

These are cilantro or coriander stems.

The most potent flavor in cilantro

is actually in the stems, not in the leaves.

I'm gonna add some green chili.

This obviously is there because it will add a kick to it,

a little bit of spiciness of it.

A little bit of dried red chili.

This one also adds a little spiciness,

but it also imparts a little bit of color to it.

I'm just gonna add a little extra green chili.

I like it a little spicy.

So what we are gonna do is

we are gonna be just tying it up.

So the reason we have it in the bag

is once it's boiled

and everything is mashed up and everything,

we don't need to hand-pick the spices out.

So it's very easy.

I'll just remove the potli out, which is the small basket.

Normally when you do a makhani,

and when we do our makhani, we add cashew nuts to it.

So when you're doing it at home

and you don't want to add nuts, you can avoid it.

I prefer adding nuts in my dish

because it gives a richness to it.

Just boil the tomato.

It just needs to cook.

You know how you're making a tomato soup?

Just boil the entire thing out.

So guys, we have our base sauce ready now.

We have cooked it.

It's boiled.

Everything is cooked, [indistinct] over here.

Now I'll show you why we put that potli.

So I'm just gonna take it out.

So you have infused your flavor inside the sauce,

and then you just take this out, keep it on the side.

What we need to do now is use a blender

and blend this entire sauce.

We are gonna blend it up

and then pass it through a strainer.

If you don't have a blender like this,

which is a commercial-grade blender,

you can use a hand blender.

It'll take a little longer time.

You have to strain your sauce.

Don't keep it chunky.

You have to strain your sauce.

It's a very small process of less than 10 minutes,

but it'll actually take your butter chicken

from good to great.

Those 10 minutes are gonna define

how good your butter chicken is gonna come out.

So as we are straining over here,

you can see the sauce is coming out very smooth.

It's coming out smooth, velvety, and creamy sauce.

We don't want it clumpy or anything.

It has to be a smoother sauce.

So I'm heating it up.

We have the sauce ready.

We are just gonna set it up a little bit.

So we have adjusted the seasoning, the taste,

the fat quantity, everything inside it.

I'm just gonna add a little butter in here.

[spoon clinking]

So we have butter in over here.

We're gonna melt it up.

There's not too much butter in butter chicken,

so we are gonna add one more spoon because of that.

Just gonna add a little ginger-garlic paste to it.

Some red chili powder over here.

Just adding the sauce,

so I'm gonna cook the sauce with it.

Nothing, just cooking it down a little bit.

So we're gonna keep it on a slow flame,

let it cook over here,

and we go there and start grilling the chicken.

[upbeat music]

[chicken grilling]

If you don't have a grill, what you can do is

you can just line it up on a rack like this

with a baker's rack and put it inside the oven.

That's also okay.

But if you grill, you'll get a better result out of it.

A lot of people, what they do is

they don't grill the chicken

and they just directly add it inside.

I think it might not give you

the best version of the butter chicken.

So to get the best and the perfect version,

grill the chicken.

I think when you grill the chicken, it gets that smokiness.

So I'm basting the chicken with some fat.

So now what we are gonna do

is we are gonna cook the chicken inside the oven,

and then we start setting up the sauce

for the grand finale.

So normally you need to control the grill and everything.

You cook your chicken around 75-80%.

Then move it inside the oven,

if you're not gonna use it for the full time,

and then you get it on your final sauce to finish it all.

[upbeat music]

I am gonna add in some butter.

Home cooks can use any kind of pot.

The thicker the pot, the better it is.

When it's thicker, it gives you leverage

of having uniform heat.

It doesn't stick to the bottom.

Just gonna add a little green chili.

I'm gonna add some ginger at the end.

I'm just gonna add a little chili powder to it.

We have our boneless chicken thigh over here,

so I'm just gonna add it in over here now.

We have our chicken over here.

That's where the bone.

Now we add in the sauce.

It's a little magic happening right now.

I wish everybody could smell this.

It is phenomenal.

Because what's happening is

the chicken and the gravy are now getting cooked,

it's getting into the sauce, it's just coming together.

I'm gonna add a little seasoning to it,

so little pinch of sugar in there.

I'm adding a little salt in there.

I love to add a little honey in my butter chicken.

So now we are gonna add the dried fenugreek leaves,

it's also called kasuri methi.

It just finishes off the dish.

It gives balance to the dish.

I think it adds a lot of taste to it.

I'm gonna add the cream to it now,

it gives the velvety touch to it.

It gives a complete mouthfeel to it.

A little bit of cilantro in here, fresh cilantro.

So you're gonna just cover it up now.

This is the finale.

This is where we know how good the butter chicken is, okay?

Just gonna open it up over here.

So these are two butter chickens.

This is the one with the boneless one,

this is the one which is the bone-in one.

First, I'm gonna plate the bone-in one.

That is the beauty.

That is a liquid gold what you are having right now.

And now the boneless one.

It's just the cut of the meat.

The taste itself will be different.

A lot of people say,

No, it might not be different.

It's still the same in everything.

I still feel that the one with the bone

always has a different taste to it.

Even the sauce itself, even though everything was similar

and added at the same time,

you see there's a little difference in the sauce itself.

So if you have some basmati rice over here,

you can also enjoy the butter chicken

with phenomenal garlic naan or paratha.

So if you see,

it's got that creamy, smooth texture over here.

And you can just taste it,

you have to taste this sauce.

What we have over here is a half chicken.

So two parts of white meat, two parts of dark meat.

But in this entire equation,

my favorite piece of meat to eat in butter chicken

is the drumstick.

With the sauce and everything,

I literally like to take a bite.

Mm!

It's amazing!

What you're looking for in a butter chicken

is that creamy tomato sauce,

that grilled, char-grilled chicken with that smoky flavor.

Everything is in there.

It's a very interesting dish where you find comfort.

If I did something good in my life,

I want to eat butter chicken.

If I'm sad sometimes in my life,

I still want to eat butter chicken.

So it's a dish which I go back to again and again.

Everything that happens in my life,

that day, I want to eat butter chicken.

So that's why it holds a lot of importance in my life.

So guys, be cool and cook butter chicken.

[upbeat music]

This shirt is not available for sale,

but if you want it, you need to cook a butter chicken,

get it to us, we will taste it,

and our team of people will decide

whether it's good or bad.

And then we give you this T-shirt.