How we cook butter chicken, and how it differs from tikka masala

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Butter chicken began as leftovers

The dish has a birthplace, which is rare. Butter chicken — murgh makhani — was created at Moti Mahal in Delhi in the years after Partition, in a kitchen that had moved from Peshawar and set up again in a new country. The story that goes with it is a thrifty one: tandoori chicken that hadn't sold by the end of service was drying out on the skewer, so it was dropped into a gravy of tomato, butter and cream to bring it back.

Whether it happened quite that neatly is another matter — two Delhi restaurants have been to court in recent years arguing over who invented it, which tells you something about how much the dish is worth. But the mechanism is real, and it explains the recipe better than any origin story could. Butter chicken is a dish designed to rescue tandoori chicken, which is why the chicken has to go in the tandoor first. If it were built to be a curry from the start, you'd poach the chicken in the sauce and save yourself the step.

That's also why the gravy is as simple as it is. It was never meant to be a complicated sauce — it had one job, which was moisture and richness. Tomato for acidity, butter and cream for fat, a little sugar's worth of sweetness from the tomatoes cooking down, and enough spice to hold it together without competing.

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How we cook it

Ours follows the original shape. The chicken is marinated, then broiled in the tandoor, then finished in the gravy — three stages, in that order, every time.

The tandoor is the part that most kitchens quietly drop. It's a second piece of equipment, a second step, and a second thing to time on a busy Friday. Poaching chicken directly in the sauce is faster and nobody complains. But the char is where the flavour lives, and it's the only reason the meat holds any texture in a gravy this rich — tandoor-cooked chicken stays chicken; poached chicken in cream goes soft.

[CHEF — the gravy: tinned or fresh tomatoes, and which? Onion in it or a pure tomato base? Cashew? Kasuri methi? Which whole spices, and when do they go in? Is the gravy batched and the dish finished to order, or built per order? This paragraph is the one no competitor can copy.]

One thing we don't do is fix the heat. Because every curry here is cooked when you order it, butter chicken comes in four levels like everything else — and it's the only dish on the menu where mild genuinely means mild, because the dairy is doing the work. Most restaurants pre-make the base and set the heat at nine in the morning.

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Tikka masala is a different dish

Chicken tikka masala has no agreed birthplace at all. The best-known claim puts it in Glasgow in the 1970s — a British-Asian restaurant improvising a sauce for a customer who wanted gravy with his chicken tikka, allegedly out of a tin of tomato soup. Other accounts place it firmly in Punjab as a natural evolution of the same tandoor-plus-gravy logic. A British foreign secretary once called it a national dish, which annoyed a lot of people and settled nothing.

What isn't disputed is what it consists of. Chicken tikka is boneless chicken marinated in yogurt and spices and cooked in the tandoor. Masala just means a spice mixture — and by extension, the sauce built from one. So the name describes an assembly rather than a recipe, which is exactly why it varies so wildly from one restaurant to the next.

The version most kitchens settle on, including ours, has onion and bell pepper in the sauce alongside the tomato and cream. Those two ingredients change everything. Onion adds savoury depth, peppers add a vegetal sharpness, and between them they cut the sweetness that defines butter chicken. It's a busier sauce with more going on and less of a single clean note.

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Side by side

Both start with the same chicken out of the same tandoor. Everything that separates them happens after that.

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Why everyone mixes them up

Three reasons, and none of them are the diner's fault.

- They look identical. Tomato plus cream plus Kashmiri chilli gives you the same orange in both pans. Kashmiri chilli is used across North Indian cooking for colour rather than heat, and it's why so many curries arrive the same shade.
- Menus use the names loosely. Plenty of kitchens run one tomato-cream base and relabel it — butter chicken here, tikka masala there, korma if you add cashew. If a restaurant is making one gravy and three names, they genuinely are the same dish.
- Tikka masala has no canonical recipe to be wrong about. Butter chicken can be made incorrectly, because there's an original to deviate from. Tikka masala is whatever the kitchen decides, which makes it useless as a fixed point of comparison.

The test, if you're curious: taste for onion. Butter chicken shouldn't have any noticeable onion sweetness or texture in the sauce. If it tastes like a tikka masala with the peppers left out, you're eating one recipe with two labels.

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Which one to order

Genuinely depends on the meal, not on which is better.

And if you're ordering butter chicken for the table because it's the safe choice — that's fine. It's the most ordered dish here for a reason. Just order it at medium rather than mild, and let the tandoor do what it's there for.

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