2010 Cooking club Week 34: Murgh Makhani (Butter Chicken Curry).

It was my birthday last thursday and to celebrate I cooked for 14 friends at my house. Was fun, they brought drinks and cakes and hugs and all that good stuff and I supplied to food.
I decided that because it was cooking for a larger than normal amount of people I'd do a curry because it's as easy to do it for 15 as it is for one!
I used the following recipe. I really enjoy it.

Right for enough to feed 4/5 people you will need the following.


Ingredients
12 Ripe medium sized tomatoes (plum are best for colour, but it's not massively important)
6/7 cardamom pods*
3/4 blades of mace*
4 cloves of garlic (roughly chopped)
Thumb sized piece of root ginger (julienne)
3/4 Green Chili's (deseeded and julienne)
5 Chicken Breasts (chopped into bite sized pieces).
1 teaspoon of Green cardamom powder*
3 teaspoon of Red Chili powder*
some Kasoori Methi (dried fenugreek leaves).*
1 500ml tub of natural yogurt
Tandoori Masala powder*
Butter... About a 3 tablespoons (no, seriously).
3 teaspoons of honey.


Instructions!

Step 1.

Pour two thirds of the yogurt into a mixing bowl and all the a couple of heaped teaspoons of Tandoori Masala and mix until it's smooth. Add the chopped chicken pieces and mix through. It will look like this.




Now Put that in the fridge to marinate. Ideally you'd leave it for a few hours, over night would be even better.




Step 2.

Get your tomatoes and cut them into quarters lengthwise and then chop then roughly.
They should look something like this.



Now put them aside for the time being.



Step 3.

Melt about half the butter in a saucepan and when it is fizzing and buddling throw in your garlic, ginger, chilis, mace, cardamom pods and let them cook away at a medium heat for about 2 minutes,

They will look like this





Now add the chopped tomatoes and cook them on a medium heat for about 25 minutes or until the tomatoes had completely cooked down to a pulpy sauce.

While that is cooking. Get your chicken from the fridge and put it into a roasting dish and cook in a preheated oven at 180c for about 25-30 minutes, stirring after 15 minutes.

the chicken will look like this, don't worry about the blackened bits, that's just the yogurt a little burned, it's all good.



When the chicken is cooked, get a hand blender and blitz the absolute bejaysus out of tomatoes and spices then pour the whole lot through a sieve into a clean pot/bowl and throw away the tomato skins, ginger fibers, cardamom pod etc which are left in the sieve.

The sauce which comes out the other side. will look like this.




Step 4.

In a clean pot, melt the rest of your butter and then add your sieves tomato sauce. Bring back to the boil and cook for about 5 minutes to make the tomato sauce a little less tart. Then reduce the heat to low and add the teaspoon of green cardamom powder, the chili powder and the rest of the yogurt. Then add your chicken (which you have broken up again, as it tends to stick together when cooked in the yogurt) and let the sauce cook away for another few minutes to let the flavours of the chicken and tadoori masala combine with the tomato sauce, then add the honey.
Now, add your kasorri Mehti and let it cook for another 2 minutes and you are ready to serve!

I usually just have mine with some Basmati rice or nan bread.

It will look something like this.



I hope this post hasn't been extremely hard to read. I also apologise for the picture quality, couldn't find my digital camera so had to use my phone.



*Anything with the * at the end can be got in any Indian store. Some of it you might be able to get in Tesco/Superquinn.


Protip:
When buying your tomatoes, go to your local fruit and veg market and ask them if they have any over ripe/bruised/etc tomatoes and you will take them off their hands for cheap. I got over 3kg of vine tomatoes for €3, I made enough sauce for about 20 people (fed 15 and have about 5 portions in the freezer) and still had about 15 tomatoes left over which were actually in pretty good condition.

Use the ones in worst nick in the sauce and keep the firmer/undamaged ones for eating in sambos/salads etc. Save yourself a small fortune.