Instant Pot Butter Chicken

The creation of butter chicken is one of the few culinary origin stories that is both precisely documented and genuinely romantic. In 1947, the year of India's partition and independence, a Punjabi restaurateur named Kundan Lal Gujral was operating Moti Mahal in the Daryaganj neighborhood of Delhi. He had developed a technique of cooking chicken in a tandoor — the cylindrical clay oven that had come south from the Punjab — that produced a bird of extraordinary smoky tenderness but left the meat dry at the surface. His solution was to simmer the leftover tandoori chicken pieces in a sauce of tomatoes, cream, butter, and spices — a sauce so gentle and rich that it rehydrated the meat and coated it in a velvet of extraordinary depth. He called it murgh makhani. Within a decade, it had become the most ordered dish in Delhi. Within fifty years, it was the most ordered dish in Britain. Within a century, it was arguably the most influential recipe in the world. Kundan Lal's original used a tandoor that burns at over 900 degrees Fahrenheit. The Instant Pot replicates the effect through pressure rather than fire — the chicken cooks in the sauce under sealed pressure, absorbing the tomato and cream from the outside in, emerging as tender as anything a clay oven ever produced.