Makhani

Makhani (from the Hindi/Punjabi word makkhan, meaning butter) describes both a style of sauce and a finishing technique central to the Punjabi kitchen. The base is built from tomatoes — fresh, canned, or a reduction — cooked with aromatics (onion, ginger, garlic), whole spices (green cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaf), and chili until deeply concentrated. This is then blended smooth and passed through a fine sieve to eliminate seeds and skins, yielding a silky, vivid red purée. Cream is added to temper the acidity and introduce richness, but the defining act is the butter finish: cold butter is worked in off or over gentle heat, coating the sauce with fat molecules that suppress sharpness and produce a characteristic glossy, velvet texture. Unlike many French butter-mounted sauces (monter au beurre), makhani also uses butter at the beginning — to fry the aromatics — creating layered butterfat presence throughout. The technique was reportedly developed at Moti Mahal restaurant in Delhi in the 1950s when Kundan Lal Gujral and Kundan Lal Jaggi combined leftover tandoori chicken with a tomato-butter gravy invented by the kitchen's head cook, Kundan Lal Gujral. Dal makhani, slow-cooked black lentils finished with cream and butter, applies the same logic to a purely vegetarian context. Modern interpretations vary butter content widely, from a restrained finishing tablespoon to the original restaurant quantity that gave the dish its unctuous richness.

“He added three tablespoons of cold butter to the strained tomato sauce off the heat, swirling continuously until the makhani turned from flat red to a glossy, coat-the-spoon orange.”

• techniquesMounting with Butter
• IngredientGhee
• CuisineIndian

1. 1.660 Curries — Raghavan Iyer
2. 2.Indian-ish — Priya Krishna
3. 3.Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors — Lizzie Collingham
4. 4.The Spice Merchant's Daughter — Christina Arokiasamy

Confidence: high