Delhi, India
Murgh Makhani
Delhi, 1950s — tandoori chicken meets a tomato-cream gravy and travels around the world.
In repertoire since Mar 2026
A leftover dish that conquered the world.
Butter chicken started life at Moti Mahal in Delhi as something to do with the previous night's tandoori chicken. Char the cold birds in a tomato-butter-cream sauce, season hard, finish with kasuri methi. By the 1960s it was on every Punjabi restaurant menu in North India; by the 1990s, on every Indian restaurant menu everywhere else.
2 · Plant
Then, the plants.
Each ingredient held water and minerals, built sugar out of light over weeks or months, ripened, and was picked. A few ingredients (salt, water) came from a different elemental story.
- Ingredient
Chicken thigh
800 g boneless skinless chicken thigh, cut into 4 cm chunks
Thigh, not breast — breast goes dry in the long simmer.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Ginger-garlic paste
3 tbsp fresh ginger-garlic paste (equal parts)
Pound fresh in a mortar — store-bought pastes are watery and lack the pungency.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Garlic
Half goes into the paste above; reserve 3 extra cloves for the gravy
Tropea allium farm - Ingredient
Kashmiri chili powder
1 tbsp Kashmiri chili powder (mild, vivid red)
Kashmiri is mostly colour, little heat — it makes the gravy red without making it inedible.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Turmeric
1 tsp ground turmeric
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Garam masala
1 tsp garam masala (for the marinade) + 1 tsp (for the gravy)
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Cashews
30 g raw cashews
Soaked in hot water for 15 minutes, then blended into the tomato base — they replace some of the cream and give body.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Butter
100 g butter, divided
Makhani means buttered. This is not the dish to economize.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Heavy cream
150 ml heavy cream
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Kasuri methi
1 tbsp kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves), crushed between palms
The flavour that makes butter chicken butter chicken. Skip it and you have tomato-cream chicken — a perfectly nice dish, but not this one.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Sugar
1 tsp sugar (to balance the tomatoes)
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Ghee
2 tbsp ghee (for charring the chicken)
Origin not yet authored
3 · Cook
Then, the kitchen.
Heat, time, salt, fat, acid — the recipe that turns the ingredients into something more than their sum.
4 · Plate
Delhi, India
Murgh Makhani
Delhi, 1950s — tandoori chicken meets a tomato-cream gravy and travels around the world.
Of the dishes that international Indian restaurants have made famous, this is the one that’s closest to its actual origin — most home cooks in Delhi today would recognise a restaurant butter chicken as part of their own tradition.
That’s not always true elsewhere. The British-Indian chicken tikka masala is a related dish but not the same one — masala is heavier on the spice, less butter-cream-led, and the chicken pieces are larger. Murgh makhani is the gentler, butter-forward parent.
Crush the kasuri methi.
Between your palms, over the pan, off the heat. The crushed leaves release a smell that fixes itself in your kitchen for an hour — and that smell is the signature of the dish.