Matty Matheson's Finger Lickin’ Butter Chicken

Let's cook some butter chicken! What is butter chicken? It is.

. . spices, you know, a little bit of tomato sauce, a little bit of cream, a little bit of spice, heat.

Some chicken. It's a spicy, creamy, buttery, chicken curry. The first steps of making butter chicken, we need to make a base.

With that base, we're gonna use our blender. We're gonna take two onions. We're just gonna chunk 'em up.

We're gonna add five garlic cloves. . .

Two long red chilies. . .

I like it spicy, so. . .

we're gonna add two bird's eye chilies. Those are spicy. I want the sauce to be just hot enough that I'm sweating.

A little bit of fear, but I can finish the dish. We're gonna use one large knob of ginger. Take your spoon and you can just peel your ginger with your spoon.

Just a little bit of olive oil. . .

About 6 tablespoons. And now, we're just gonna pulse. And then we're gonna puree it.

That is perfect. Oh-ah. Smell that.

This is ghee, clarified butter. If you boil butter, it separates. You got the clarified butter, and then on the bottom you have all the whey, all the fat.

It's like using a canola oil or a vegetable oil. It has a higher burn rate. If you were to use whole butter, all of that milk and the whey in that butter burn.

That's when butter burns. Oh yeah. That's about half a cup.

We're gonna add. . .

All of our little vegetable. This is our base. This smells really good.

This is a medium high heat and we're gonna allow all of the natural sugars to caramelize. Rather than browning them from heat, we're gonna allow them to chill out and relax, bringing those natural sugars out of the onions, out of the ginger, out of the peppers. I'm just gonna cook this for about 20 minutes.

This looks so beautiful. We're gonna make the most insane butter chicken you've ever seen. So now we've cooked down our base, our vegetable base with the chilies.

We're gonna add our spices: 3 tablespoons of turmeric. And, 2 tablespoons chili powder, cumin. .

. Ground coriander, garam masala. Garam masala is almost like a curry paste.

It's not a curry paste, it's powder, but without it you will not have butter chicken. What the heat is gonna do with those spices is just open them up, let them come alive. Now we're gonna add some of our trusty tomato paste.

We're gonna add 3 tablespoons. Now, we're gonna add one jar of tomato sauce. You want to make sure that you're using just like a tomato puree.

You don't really want chunks of tomato. You want it to be really smooth. Butter chicken is a smooth dish.

At this point, everything's chilled out. I didn't want to add the fenugreek when we added all the dry spices 'cause I didn't want to hurt the fenugreek. Now that this is pretty much a sauce, we're gonna add one tablespoon of fenugreek.

Just think of it as like Indian oregano. And now we have to allow our sauce to cook for about one hour. We're just gonna let this simmer.

Put the lid on it, simmer it really low because it's kind of a thicker sauce with a lot of sugars in there. And that can caramelize on the bottom and maybe burn. The butter chicken sauce.

Look at this. This has been just simmering. We still haven't added our cream, but we're gonna add our chicken.

This is a boneless skinless chicken breast. I don't like chicken breasts. .

. most of the time. But, when making the butter chicken, it is the chicken breast that you're looking for.

It's light and it is fluffy. It doesn't have to break down and it cooks very quickly. We're adding four chicken breasts.

We're gonna add it right into our sauce. We're not gonna brown it. Ah, we're getting so close.

We're gonna put the lid on it one more time, and in ten minutes. . .

We're gonna finish this guy. Chicken breast. .

. Soon as that puppy turns white, it's cooked. Little fluffy pillows.

Oof! That's hot. Okay, here we go.

I need my cream! Which one's the cream? Oh yeah.

You always gotta check. We're gonna take heavy cream - whipped cream - we're gonna add. .

. one cup. Look at how this transforms.

We have a quarter pound of butter. You heard me. Unsalted butter.

We're gonna put it in. And we're gonna stir that butter into. .

. Our butter chicken. We need that butter.

Now, look at that sauce consistency. That's what you're looking for. It's nice and thick.

Just put a lid on it. Butter chicken is good to go. G-T-G.

Aaah. This is the star of our meal. Look at that.

We're just gonna take some cilantro. Mm! I'm gonna give it a rough chop.

Look at this. Ooh.