Judy Hom
Have you used your Instant Pot yet? Here’s another recipe for you to try.
I read that the Instant Pot makes wonderful curries in a fraction of the time that it takes traditional methods. For my first Indian curry, I decided to make Butter Chicken or murgh makhani. Butter chicken is an easy curry to love. It’s flavorful but not too spicy. It’s a great main dish for non-Indians who may not be accustomed to fiery Indian curries.
I used Urvashi Pitre’s Instant Pot butter chicken recipe. She is known as “The Butter Chicken Lady”. You can find her recipe online: The Butter Chicken Lady who made Indian cooks love the Instant Pot. or in the Indian Instant Pot cookbook. My Indian co-worker gave me this book so Urvashi Pitre is the real deal.
The ingredients are readily available at your local supermarket. I bought my garam masala or Indian spice at the Indian market but I discovered that you buy it most anywhere — Safeway, Food Maxx, Walmart, and even Target! If you don’t want to buy garam masala, then no problem because the Indian Instant Pot cookbook even has a recipe for making it. It’s a combination of coriander seeds, cumin seeds, cardamom seeds, bay leaves, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon stick. Most likely, many of you already have the spices needed to make it.
My butter chicken was tasty and quite respectable for a first attempt. Warning – please use an immersion blender and not a regular blender. I didn’t have an immersion blender so I tried blending the sauce in a regular blender. The sauce belched out of the blender and spattered my husband Winston. Bad idea. Oops.
As advertised, the recipe makes lots of extra sauce. We used the extra sauce with fish and shrimp. Yum. Yum.
It was a fun experience. Give it a try. I now know why butter chicken is called butter chicken — the recipe uses an entire stick of butter!
