How to Make Butter Chicken (Restaurant Style at Home)

Put 300 g of boneless chicken breast into a bowl with a tablespoon each of ginger garlic paste and red chilli powder, plus salt. Work it through with your hands until every piece is coated red.

Leave it for 15 to 20 minutes. That is long enough for the salt and chilli to get into the surface of the meat without the acid starting to break down the texture.

Heat oil in a wide pan and lay the marinated pieces in. You want them seared and just cooked through, with some colour on the edges.

Lift them out into a bowl and set aside. They finish cooking later in the gravy, so pulling them now keeps them from going tough.

In the same pan, add oil and a spoonful of butter, then the roughly cut onions. Keep them moving until they soften and turn translucent.

Using the same pan matters. Whatever stuck to the base from frying the chicken lifts into the onions and ends up in the gravy.

Tip in 500 g of roughly slit tomatoes and 50 g of cashews. The cashews are what make this gravy thick and rounded rather than thin and sharp.

Add water, garlic paste, salt, malt vinegar, sugar, garam masala and kashmiri chilli powder. The kashmiri chilli is there mostly for colour, so do not swap it for something hotter.

Let it bubble away for 15 to 20 minutes. The tomatoes collapse, the cashews soften, and the raw edge cooks off the garlic and the spices.

Give it a stir now and then. You are done when the tomatoes have lost their shape entirely and the mixture looks like a rough sauce.

Take the pan off the heat and blend the mixture until smooth. An immersion blender straight in the pan saves washing up, though a jug blender works too.

Run it longer than feels necessary. The smoother you get it now, the less you leave behind in the sieve.

Pour the puree back into the pan through a fine sieve, pressing the solids with the back of a ladle so you waste as little as possible.

This is the step that separates butter chicken from an ordinary tomato curry. Tomato skins and cashew fragments come out, and what goes into the pan is glossy and smooth.

Drop in five tablespoons of butter and three of cream, and stir until the butter has melted through. The colour shifts from red to that familiar orange as it goes.

Keep the heat low. Cream that boils hard can split, and you will see it break into grainy flecks.

Tip the fried chicken back into the gravy along with crushed kasoori methi. Simmer for five to seven minutes so the pieces take on the sauce.

Finish with a swirl of cream and a pinch more kasoori methi crushed between your palms. Serve with rice or naan.