chicken tikka masala

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Chicken Tikka Masala – at home – on the couch – in 30 minutes. THIS IS HAPPENING.

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Welcome to the most creamy, luscious, medium-spicy, weeknight-manageable, must-have-it-NOW chicken tikka masala.

It is everything you want tikka masala to be: packed with flavor, with just enough browned bits on your chicken to keep it interesting, tangy but also rich, with that signature bronze-orange tikka masala color. Scoop it up over hot rice with a shower of fresh cilantro and you are in tikka masala biz-ness.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT

Okay, you might have opinions about this, but personally I like to approach chicken tikka masala as a five ingredient recipe:

• Chicken
• Yogurt
• Tomato sauce
• Cream
• Masala paste

Let’s talk about the masala paste. In order to approach this as a five ingredient recipe, we need to establish that one of the “ingredients” is a MASALA PASTE with lots of fragrant and punchy and deeply flavored ingredients.

You make this masala paste once, it is done in about five minutes, and then it lives in your freezer so that forevermore you will have the ability to make this chicken tikka masala as a – you guessed it – quick, easy, five ingredient recipe.

Are you following?

So the first order of business here is making the masala paste. Today. Right now. End of story. One five minute batch of masala paste = many batches of this five ingredient CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA with hardly any thought or effort.