Chicken tikka masala

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Chicken tikka masala is chicken tikka in a masala gravy. Though there is no standard recipe for chicken tikka masala, most are variants of a tomato gravy (using puree or even ketchup) with cream or coconut cream and various common spices. While fish and paneer tikkas are fairly uncommon, the corresponding tikka masalas are hugely popular - especially in the UK.

chicken tikka masala in a pot

Chicken tikka masala is one of the most popular Indian dishes in the world, though it originates from Britain. Its popularity has proven so great that almost every Indian restaurant worldwide offers it. It has arguably replaced tandoori chicken as the flagship of Indian and South Asian cuisines. In India, though gaining popularity, it is not nearly as popular as it is outside the Indian subcontinent.

So popular is chicken tikka masala that its origins have attained legendary proportions. It is commonly believed that chicken tikka masala originated from the kitchens of Bangladeshi chefs in the UK. The original is claimed by many establishments from Birmingham to London to Glasgow's Shish Mahal restaurant, but none of these claims has been convincingly established. There are many theories about how the dish originated, probably around the seventies, the late sixties, or even earlier. Some say the chef tossed together a tomato gravy when a diner returned a dry tikka; some think it was a way to recycle yesterday's leftover kebabs, and others say it was just an inventive adaptation of Indian and Bangladeshi techniques to both South Asian and British palates.

Some claim that its birth came from British India (which included modern Pakistan and Bangladesh). The necessity to adapt food from the Indian subcontinent to the British palate was the impetus of its creation, some allege. Some also claim that chicken tikka masala originated from Punjab due to the region having a dish similarly prepared with tomato gravy, the popular Murgh Makhni (butter chicken). Though a large proportion of Asians that came to Britain were from the Punjab region, the vast majority of "Indian" restaurants in the UK were in fact run by Bangladeshi chefs, with as many as 85% of them being run by Bangladeshis until 1998, hence it is more likely that it originated from Bangladeshi chefs in Britain.^[1] Only further adding to the confusion, the first recorded use of the term occurred in the US in 1975.