I loooove my Instant Pot, and I loooove Indian food. So I was over the moon when my hubby (Meat of LettuceMeat) got me a surprise gift: Indian Instant Pot® Cookbook: Traditional Indian Dishes Made Easy and Fast. The big question: can we cook our fave Indian restaurant quality dishes at home? Over the past week, I’ve been cooking up a storm of Indian recipes, starting with almost everyone’s favourite Indian dish, butter chicken.
I’ve realized that cooking Indian food is actually very simple. Using high quality fresh ingredients and making your own spice blends are super important to achieving deep, umami flavours. It’s also much easier once you’ve stocked up on Indian staples – e.g. cilantro, coconut milk, ginger, garam masala and ghee.
Making Butter Chicken!
1. Assemble the ingredients!
Ingredients
2: Place sauce ingredients into the Instant Pot.
3. Lay the boneless, skinless chicken thighs on top in a single layer (here I used organic chicken which was on sale!).
4) Lock Instant Pot lid and set to 10 minutes on manual high pressure.
5) After timer has finished, allow natural release and unlock lid.
After pressure cooking the chicken and sauce
6) Remove chicken (carefully!) At this point, it is cooked and so moist!
7) Use an immersion blender to blend the sauce until smooth. Now it’s starting to look like the butter chicken sauce that we all know and love!
8. Add more delicious stuff to the sauce, aka butter, coconut milk, and more butter! 🙂
Placing ingredients into Instant Pot
9. Stir sauce until smooth and thick.
10. Add chicken back into sauce. (At this point, there was lots of extra sauce, so I froze half for future use!)
11. Serve with basmati rice, and your favourite sides. I have some authentic Indian hot sauce in this picture! Yummy!
Verdict
My first butter chicken was pretty good! Two ways I will improve it next time:
- make it a bit spicier (I had halved the garam masala, in my delusion that the kids would actually try it)
- thicken up sauce more (possibly add more butter – is MORE possible?? – or maybe reduce liquid in tomatoes)
Overall, both Meat and I were happy campers! Would definitely make again!
You can pick up the recipe book here
