BBQ57/17: Murgh Makhani (Butter Chicken):
I have cooked a few dishes from Indian Kitchen by Maunika Gowardhan recently and have really enjoyed them. I spotted this dish and fancied trying it as it mixes BBQ with curry which sounds ideal!
I put ginger, garlic and a birds eye chilli into my mini food processer and blitzed it until smooth (fairly). I then put yoghurt into a bowl and added gram flour then mixed it until the lumps were gone before adding the garlic paste (above), paprika, chilli powder, garam masala, coriander, cinnamon, saffron and salt. I stirred the mixture well then added chicken thighs which I had sliced into bitesize pieces before mixing it well and leaving in the fridge overnight.
On cook day I fired up the BBQ with 2 zones for direct and indirect cooking. No smoking wood and no grill grates for this one. I then slotted the chicken onto skewers. As the chicken pieces were small I didn’t use the Russian skewers from Manchester vacs but used some smaller ones instead to avoid the chicken ripping/falling off.
When the grill was ready I placed the skewers on and started making the sauce by melting butter in a pan then adding cardamom pods, cassia bark and cloves. This was fried for 20 seconds before adding sliced onion and cooking for 5 minutes until the onion was light brown.
I then added grated ginger and 2 birds eye chillis then fried everything for a minute before adding chilli powder, garam masala and tomato puree. After mixing it I added double cream, honey, fenugreek, salt, pepper and some water.
I had been going back out to the chicken and rotating it every 5 minutes and it was coming along well. Once the internal temperature of the chicken hit 75C I took it off and added it to the sauce.
The chicken sat in the sauce on a low heat for 6 minutes before I served it up. The sauce had really softened the chicken.
The colour of the curry was fantastic and it smelt great.
I really enjoyed this dish it was a very tasty curry with a good kick to the sauce but it tastes very clean too unlike curry from a takeaway. There are quite a lot of ingredients used but I buy them in bulk from a Chinese supermarket which is a lot cheaper than the supermarkets. Amazon have started selling a lot of herbs and spices recently and they are also good value.
The chicken did catch slightly whilst I was making the sauce but the crispy bits are always the best! I wouldn’t actually change anything with this cook but will be making it more often because it was that good!
The recipes for the Tandoori Chicken and the Murgh Makhani Sauce are both available online here and here.