Nut Butter

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe.

Who ever realized that making your own nut butter could be so easy.  For my first challenge in quite a few months I was happy to see that it was for something that I could see myself making on a normal day.  Although I do like the challenge of trying things that are completely new and foreign to me for these challenges, sometimes it is nice to make something that is similar to my non-Daring Cooks meals.

The dish I chose to make with my almond butter instantly sounded to me like the butter chicken recipe that continues to elude me.  You see, for close to a year I have been making butter chicken whenever I come across a new recipe and it always lacks something.  As the ingredients were simmering away I could tell this was going to definitely be a repeat recipe.

I never would have thought to use a nut butter to give the sauce that thick consistence the many other recipes had been lacking.  But once the almond butter went into the sauce I was delighted to see that the sauce was nice and thick.  So thick in fact that the recipe calls for the use of water or chicken broth to thin it out.  I was scared to thin it out too much for fear it would resemble my runny butter chickens of the past so I used the liquid sparingly.

When making this dish again I would change a few things like thinning out the sauce a bit more and add some spice with either some green chillies or chili powder.  This recipe was beyond yummy and with those few tweaks next time I am sure to have the perfect chicken dish.

Chicken with Curried Tomato Almond Sauce

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1.5 tablespoons garam masala

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

4 tablespoons butter

1 large onion, diced

2 cloves garlic

1 15 ounce can tomato sauce

1/3 cup almond butter

1/3 cup milk

1/2 to 3/4 cup chicken broth or water

Stir garam masala, ginger, cinnamon, and pepper together in a small bowl. Set aside.

Melt the butter in large nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Add the onion and cook gently for several minutes to infuse the butter with onion flavor. Keep the heat low to avoid burning the butter; a little color is fine. Add the spice blend and garlic and cook for 1 minute or till fragrant, stirring constantly. Add the tomato sauce, stir well, and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer. Whisk in almond butter and milk until thoroughly combined with tomato sauce. The almond butter is thick so it takes a while to make a smooth sauce.  Add chicken breast to sauce and return to simmer. Add broth (or water) to sauce to reach desired consistency; return to simmer.

Serve over rice.

Tags: Almond Butter, Chicken, Daring Cooks, Indian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Chicken, Daring Cooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.