How to Add the Tandoori Style Chicken to the Sauce

Hi I am Edward, and we are here at Sur La Table Cooking School in Arlington, Virginia, and today we are making Butter Chicken. Right now, we are going to make the sauce and put the Tandoori-Style Chicken into it. So we will start out with a very large nonstick sauté pan, and we are going to put half of our butter, which is two tablespoons, into that pan, some medium, medium high heat. Now we want to melt the butter, and once it melts and just starts to froth up a little bit, we are going to put the chicken pieces in there, and we are going to lightly sear them, so they can pick up some of that great butter flavor. Use the best butter that you can get for this dish, since it is the star of the show. We’re going to put our chicken pieces in. We’re just going to cook in this butter turning them often just for a couple of minutes. So we are turning our chicken around often, and we are just looking forward to sear lightly, get a little bit more brown spots and to have a sort of shiny buttery glaze on the chicken. So this looks great, we can take it out and put it back on our plate; the chicken was already fully cooked so we do not need to worry about putting it back on the same plate. So now we are going to take our wet spice mixture, the ground cumin and the paprika and we are going to reduce our heat a little bit, lower it down to medium. We are going to add that to the pan, and we are going to cook this, stirring it, just until the liquid evaporates and you can smell the spices, perfect! So now we will add our tomato mixture from the blender, the one with the chilies and ginger, and we are going to stir that up really well. S o our sauce has cooked for its first period of time, about 5 to 8 minutes, and it is slightly reduced and smelling great. So now we are going to add our half a cup of heavy cream and our salt, our one teaspoon of salt, which you would adjust to taste when the dish is finished. We are going to stir that in really good, get it all nice and mixed up together. Now we are going to add our chicken pieces back into the pan, into the sauce, and we are going to bring it up to a simmer and then we will put the lid back on and we will led it gently cook for another 8 to 10 minutes, and I will make sure I turn these around in the sauce, get them all nicely coated. It is all ready to go. So to finish the dish, what we are going to do is, add our roasted crushed cumin seeds and our chopped cilantro, as well as our remaining two tablespoons of butter. If by chance your sauce had thickened up quite a bit during the simmering, you would add more heavy cream or light cream or half-and-half, just to thin to the consistency that you want, but I think this one is perfect. So, take our roasted crushed cumin seeds and most of our chopped cilantro, I will hold back on some so I can sprinkle it on top as a garnish. I'm going to fold those items in to get them mixed up with the sauce. Now we will take our remaining butter and we can break it up into small pieces and just dot it around the dish and let it melt into the sauce. So, here is our finished butter chicken, it looks awesome! You definitely want to serve this with naan bread, either fresh homemade or store-bought, enjoy.