Chicken Tikka Masala

Tikka means 'piece' or 'chunk' in Urdu and Hindi. In cooking, it refers to small cubes of meat skewered and cooked in a tandoor over intense heat. The name tells you this is a two-stage dish: first the tikka — the chicken is marinated and cooked hard over direct high heat until charred — then the masala, the spiced sauce the chicken finishes in. The two-stage process is what gives the dish its character: smoky char from the first cook, creaminess from the sauce. A curry made by simply adding raw chicken to sauce is not tikka masala.

The origin is genuinely contested. The most documented story credits Ali Ahmed Aslam, a Bangladeshi-Scottish chef in Glasgow, with inventing the dish in the 1970s by adding a tomato-cream sauce to dry chicken tikka at a customer's request. Other accounts suggest similar dishes existed in Punjab before the British version. In 2001, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook described it as a national dish of Britain. Most food historians now treat it as a British-Indian fusion — rooted in tandoori techniques brought by immigrant chefs, adapted for European palates. In India, tikka masala is well-known and enjoyed but generally considered a diaspora adaptation.

Wateriness almost always comes from onions that weren't properly browned and tomatoes not cooked long enough. The onions need 15 to 20 minutes over medium heat until genuinely golden-brown. The tomato paste must cook in the oil until it darkens and smells fried. The crushed tomatoes need at least 15 minutes uncovered until oil separates at the surface — that's when the sourness has cooked out. For thickness: blend the onion-tomato base before adding the chicken. Cashew paste (cashews blended with water) also thickens and mellows the sauce without adding richness. Kasuri methi added at the end cuts any remaining sharpness.

You can, but chicken breast dries out when seared hard enough to get char marks — and the char matters. If using breast: do not fully cook it during the searing stage, let it finish in the sauce. Reduce simmering time in the sauce to 4 to 5 minutes from 8. Marinate for at least 1 hour — the yogurt acid protects against drying out. The best approach is a 50/50 mix: breast for tenderness, thighs to provide insurance against overcooking. If using breast only, pull it the moment the pink disappears inside.

Yes, there is a difference. Jarred sauces are consistent and convenient but lack several things: the flavour of onions browned slowly, the smokiness from properly charred chicken, the freshness of real ginger and garlic. The sauce tends to taste uniform and muted compared to one built from scratch. A practical middle path: use a good curry paste (not a finished sauce) as a base, add your own freshly browned onion, ginger, garlic, and self-cooked charred chicken. That approach is faster than fully from scratch and significantly better than pouring jarred sauce over cooked chicken.