How Do You Make the Best Butter Chicken?

Butter chicken was invented to rescue leftovers. That is not a slight on it — it is the whole reason it works. And the flavour everyone describes as "buttery" is, for the most part, not butter at all. Get those two facts straight and your butter chicken improves immediately.

It is the most ordered curry in Australia and the one most often made badly at home, because the home version usually skips the single step the dish was built around. Here is where it actually came from, the technique that separates a great one from a beige one, exactly what to buy in Australia, and where to eat a benchmark version before you attempt it.

Full disclosure before we start: Providoor sells a butter chicken, and it is waiting at the bottom of this page. It will keep. What follows is what you would cook with a free weekend — which is the fairest standard to hold any version to, ours included.

Where butter chicken actually came from

Moti Mahal opened in Delhi's Daryaganj after the 1947 Partition, run by Kundan Lal Gujral, Kundan Lal Jaggi and Thakur Dass, who had come across from Peshawar. Their tandoori chicken was the draw. The problem with tandoori chicken is that it dries out fast, and at the end of a service there was always unsold stock sitting there stiffening.

So they built a gravy to put it back together: tomatoes, a great deal of butter, cream, and the yesterday's chicken cut into it. The fat and the acid rehydrated meat that would otherwise have been thrown out. Murgh makhani was, in its original form, a leftovers dish — and that origin is the key to cooking it, because it means the chicken is cooked first, separately, and the sauce is built around it.

Who exactly invented it is still argued over, and not casually. The Gujral family maintain it was created back in Peshawar in 1920 at the earlier Moti Mahal. In January 2024 a suit was filed in the Delhi High Court by a grandson of Kundan Lal Gujral, challenging a rival restaurant's use of the tagline claiming to be the inventors of butter chicken and dal makhani. Few dishes are loved enough to end up in front of a judge.

The two things that actually make it

One: the char

This is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is why home butter chicken tastes flat. If you drop raw chicken into a tomato and cream sauce and simmer it, you have made a perfectly nice creamy tomato chicken. You have not made butter chicken.

The chicken has to be marinated and then cooked hard and separately first, until the edges genuinely blacken in places. A tandoor runs at something close to 480°C, which is why restaurant versions have a smoky depth a saucepan cannot produce. At home you are chasing that with the hottest surface you own — a cast iron pan taken to the point of smoking, or a grill on full. Three to four minutes a side. You want char, not colour.

Two: the kasoori methi

Kasoori methi is dried fenugreek leaves, and it is doing far more of the work than the butter is. It is where that savoury, faintly maple, unmistakably "butter chicken" aroma comes from. Crush it between your palms as you add it — the friction releases the oils — and add it off the heat at the very end, or you cook the perfume straight out of it.

If you want proof of how much of the flavour is fenugreek rather than fat, Jessi Singh at Don't Tell Aunty in Sydney makes his butter chicken with no butter, no ghee and no oil at all, leaning on fenugreek leaves and seeds instead. As he puts it: "I make butter chicken but I don't add butter to it." It still tastes like butter chicken.

The ingredients — and where to buy them in Australia

Two of these you will not find in a supermarket spice aisle, and they are the two that matter most.

Kasoori methi and Kashmiri chilli

Both come from Indian grocers rather than Coles or Woolworths. In Sydney, the strip around Harris Park and Wentworthville is the obvious hunting ground. Online and Australia-wide, True Indian Spices ship both from Sunnybank in Brisbane, and Tales of India carry kasoori methi by the packet.

Kashmiri chilli powder is worth understanding: it is what gives restaurant butter chicken that deep red without making it hot. If you use ordinary chilli powder to get the same colour you will produce something no child will eat. Buy Kashmiri, and control heat separately.

Chicken — thigh, not breast

Thigh has the fat to survive being charred hard. Breast does not, and it turns to string under that heat. On the bone is better again if you can be bothered. This is also why the original worked as a leftovers dish: thigh meat forgives a second cooking in a way breast never will.

Cashews, yoghurt, ghee and cream

Raw cashews, soaked and blended into the onion and tomato base, are the restaurant trick for body. They give the sauce weight without you having to pour in ever more cream to get there — which is how butter chicken tips over into being sickly.

Full-fat yoghurt for the marinade, with lemon: the acid and the enzymes tenderise the meat, and twenty minutes does real work even if overnight is better. Ghee for the frying, because it takes heat that butter cannot. And cream at the end, off the heat.

The method, step by step

For four: 800g chicken thigh, 200g full-fat yoghurt, a tin of good tomatoes, a large onion, 60g raw cashews, ghee, cream, and the two spices above.

1. Marinate twice. First a short rub of lemon juice, salt and Kashmiri chilli, thirty minutes. Then the real marinade: yoghurt, ginger and garlic paste, garam masala, a pinch of kasoori methi. Overnight in the fridge if you have the time; twenty minutes if you do not.
2. Soak the cashews. In hot water, while the chicken sits. They need to blend to a completely smooth cream, and dry cashews will not.
3. Char the chicken. Screaming hot cast iron with a little ghee, or a grill at full. Three to four minutes a side, in batches, so the pan stays hot. You are looking for genuinely blackened edges and chicken cooked through to 75°C. Set it aside — resting juices go into the sauce later.
4. Build the base. Soften the onion in ghee, add tomatoes, then blend with the drained cashews until completely smooth. Push it through a sieve if you want the restaurant texture. This is the step that separates silky from grainy.
5. Bloom the spices. Fresh ghee in the pan, Kashmiri chilli and garam masala in for thirty seconds until fragrant, then the purée back in. Simmer fifteen minutes until it darkens and thickens and the raw tomato edge is gone. Do not rush this.
6. Season the balance. A little sugar or honey is traditional, not cheating — tomatoes are acidic and the dish is meant to land slightly sweet against the salt. Taste and adjust here, not at the end.
7. Bring it together off the heat. Pan off the burner. Butter, then cream, then the charred chicken and its juices, then the kasoori methi crushed between your palms. Stir it through and let the residual heat do the rest.
8. Rest it. Five minutes before you serve, which is when the fenugreek actually comes forward. Butter chicken is one of the few curries that is better the next day.

Three tricks worth stealing from restaurant kitchens

• Moti Mahal — Delhi Treat it as a sauce for cooked chicken The original logic still holds. Build the gravy to receive chicken that is already cooked and charred, rather than building a sauce and poaching chicken in it. Everything about the seasoning follows from that order of operations.
• Don't Tell Aunty — Sydney Lean on fenugreek, not fat Jessi Singh's version uses no butter, ghee or oil, and still reads as butter chicken, because fenugreek leaves and seeds are carrying the flavour. Even if you keep the butter in, it tells you which ingredient to be generous with.
• The cashew purée Body without more cream Soaked cashews blended into the tomato base give richness that cream alone cannot, and they stop the sauce splitting when it is reheated. This is why restaurant butter chicken holds together and yours sometimes does not.

Where to eat a great butter chicken in Australia

One in each city we deliver to, and all three worth the trip.

• Sydney Don't Tell Aunty 414 Bourke Street, Surry Hills Jessi Singh's deliberately "unauthentic" Indian kitchen, and the butter chicken made without butter is the dish to order. Instructive as well as very good — it shows you what the flavour is actually made of.
• Melbourne Kolkata Cricket Club Crown, Southbank Mischa Tropp's Bengali-leaning dining room, awarded a hat in 2025, with a charcoal-fired tandoor working in full view. The butter chicken is the one people come back for, and the naan comes off the same tandoor.
• Brisbane It's Mirchi Healthy Indian Paddington A lighter, organic-leaning treatment of the classics that still gets the butter chicken right — proof the dish does not need to be heavy to be good. Useful if the full-cream version defeats you.

Or make life easy

Marinating overnight, charring in batches and sieving a purée is a genuinely rewarding Sunday. It is not a Wednesday.

Luke Nguyen's Butter Chicken is a modern, deliberately restrained reading of the dish — chicken Maryland cooked down in a rich tomato base with onion, garlic, tandoori paste and ghee, then finished with cream for that velvety sauce. It is pitched firmly at mild, which is a choice rather than a compromise: it makes it an easy order with kids at the table and with guests who do not want to be challenged by dinner. $23, serves two, 600g, chef-made and flash-frozen, delivered across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Reheating is six to eight minutes in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring regularly, or four to five minutes in the microwave on high with a stir through the middle. Defrost it in the fridge first. The chef's own serving suggestion is aromatic rice, papadams and a mint yoghurt — and tear up a garlic and coriander naan for the sauce, because that is the entire point of the sauce. Rice is sold separately.

One thing to check before you serve it to a crowd: it contains gluten and wheat, dairy, tree nuts and sesame, mostly by way of the tandoori paste.

Common questions