One balmy evening, I was having dinner at a friend’s place when the pasta on the table caught my eye. It looked like the usual pasta cooked with a tomato sauce. But the flavour seemed different. And there was good reason for that — this was something called butter chicken pasta. The sauce for the pasta was the sauce that forms the gravy of butter chicken.

It shouldn’t surprise me, for butter chicken is a dish that never fails to excite people. It even figured in a traditional Assamese wedding feast that I had attended in Guwahati several years ago. I was told the Assamese guests wanted it.

Legend has it that the dish was invented in Delhi’s Moti Mahal restaurant. The chefs didn’t know what to do with their leftover tandoori chicken, so they put it in a sauce of tomato, butter, cream and cashew paste, flavoured with kasuri methi, and the butter chicken was born.

These are the basic ingredients of the dish. But these days, chefs are using the same elements, but coming up with exotic versions of the old butter chicken.

I had something called a chitta butter chicken in Dhaba by Claridges in Delhi some days ago. Chitta or chitti is the Punjabi word for white. “I was listening to the song Chittiyan Kalaiyan, and the dish somehow came to my mind,” executive chef Ravi Saxena says. He worked on it for several weeks, playing with the ingredients till he was happy with the outcome.

Chitta butter chicken has the usual ingredients — along with yoghurt, lemon juice, green chilli paste, ginger, garlic, green cardamom, mace, white pepper and fresh coriander. It has the taste of butter chicken — yet is different.

I remember chef Saxena had once created a dish called butterless chicken. The recipe was not very different, but he had used reduced skimmed milk instead of cream for the gravy.

Another creative chef is the young chef-owner of a restaurant called Spice Kraft in Calcutta. Chef Sambit Banick likes to experiment with food (he had served us some excellent pork rib burrahs) and wants to turn the butter chicken into an Indo-Italian dish — called butter chicken da lasagna.

“It comes with a crispy lachcha stack and makhani foam in a bowl,” he says.

I find that chefs enjoy deconstructing the butter chicken. Suprabhat Roy, the executive chef of New Delhi’s Eros Hotel, which has a Punjabi restaurant called Singh Sahib, presents his deconstructed butter chicken with dahi chilli croquette, cashew tomato relish and new age makhani. Tandoori chicken pieces are served with hung curd croquettes, a hot butter sauce and a cold cherry tomato relish.

For the hung curd croquettes, he adds paprika, salt, roasted cumin powder, kasuri methi powder and garam masala to hot mustard oil. Then he adds hung curd, mixes it with roasted chana powder. This is taken off the stove and refrigerated for at least two hours. The mixture is then turned into small barrel-shaped croquettes, crumbed and fried.

Chef Banick has his own version of the deconstructed butter chicken. “Every principal element of the good old butter chicken has been dismantled to accentuate the taste and flavours individually,” he says.

He marinates cubes of chicken for at least 10 hours and then pan-sears them, sealing in the juices. The onion is dehydrated and pulverized. “Finely chopped garlic in a tomato concasse is reduced and strained. This is cooled and aerated into a spicy lehsuni tamatar soda, served in a shot glass,” he explains.

All this makes me wonder why chefs like to give an old dish a new makeover. “You can’t reinvent the wheel,” chef Saxena says. But you can always do some value addition.

Location courtesy: Dhaba by The Claridges, New Delhi,
and Spice Kraft, Calcutta