Our Butter Chicken is critically acclaimed and our most popular dish.
When we opened our first restaurant next to Trianglen in Copenhagen in 2003, our delicious Butter Chicken quickly became our most famous dish. Since then, we have opened a total of 6 shops in Nørrebro, Østerbro, Frederiksberg, Amager, Lyngby, and Søborg, but one thing remains the same: The Butter Chicken is still Bindia’s most famous and popular dish - and that’s not without reason!
”Heavenly” a critic from Jyllandsposten described Bindia’s Butter Chicken, while a writer from AOK thought our Butter Chicken “ought to be on a list of illegal, addictive drugs.”
At first, Bindia’s founder and head chef, Amer Suleman was a little surprised by the immediate popularity of his Butter Chicken. But when you consider his eye for detail and the level of consideration put into making Bindia’s Butter Chicken, it is not that odd at all.
Is it even the best Butter Chicken in Copenhagen? We actually think so…
Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani) is a curry dish from Northern India. The main ingredient is, as the name indicates, the famous Butter curry or Makhani, which is probably more famous in the West than its country of origin by now.
At Bindia, we make the Makahni as they do in the mountainous regions like Kashmir and Punjab where Amer Suleman is born and raised.
Here, you typically eat much milder food than in Southern India. Furthermore, nuts, instead of animal fat, are often central to the cooking process by providing lots of healthy and nutritional calories, which are so essential in these colder regions.
We, therefore, have a special focus on the nuts – especially cashew – in our Butter Chicken.
As with our Korma curry, we have developed just the right mix of nuts and seeds for our Butter curry, which doesn’t just provide the dish with healthy calories, but simultaneously produces an exquisite and creamy texture. Together with the sourish tomatoes and the honey, the nut mix furthermore gives our Butter Chicken its particular sweetness with its subtle nutty nuances.
In fact, at several stages of the cooking process, you’ll find other secrets contributing to the success of our Butter Chicken, like for instance in the sophisticated and attentive approach to the heating of Suleman’s Makhani curry.
At just the right temperature, a chemical reaction takes place between the fat and the tomatoes, which makes the taste come together in just the right way. If you never reach this temperature, you’ll never reach the same richness of taste, while you risk completely ruining the dish, if the temperature exceeds this magical sweet spot, Bindia’s head chef warns.
Besides the right temperature, Bindia’s Butter Chicken must be seasoned and flavored with not only the right spices, but also by the correct methods, which happens through a process called tempering - a specific spicing method common in India and its neighboring countries of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
During tempering, grinded spices are stir-fried in burning hot ghee (or oils suitable for such heat). When the crushed spices hit the boiling warm fat, they have a heat shock response, which makes them discharge their essential oils and, thereby, rich flavor.
During its creation, our Butter Chicken goes through four different phases of tempering. And we even use lots of spices you won’t find in a Butter Chicken elsewhere.
We use a total of 23 different ingredients in this customer favorite: all the way from the base of the curry consisting of just tomatoes, ginger, and garlic, to the more surprising contents like poppy seeds and licorice root.
Last, but not least, we use tenderloins from Danish chickens. These we marinate in our own marinade of tandoori spices, which are spices that can handle the scorching heat of a tandoor oven. In our marinade these includes spices like ginger, turmeric, and fenugreek. Finally, we grill the meat at very temperatures to ensure that it doesn’t dry out, but stays juicy, tasty, and tender.
”The result is addictively delicious!” a critic from Berlingske Tidene exclaimed, but we think you should judge for yourself by visiting our take-away shops in Østerbro, Nørrebro, Frederiksberg, Amager, Lyngby, and Søborg, or by ordering here.