Chicken Tikka Masala – at home – on the couch – in 30 minutes. THIS IS HAPPENING.

Welcome to the most creamy, luscious, medium-spicy, weeknight-manageable, must-have-it-NOW chicken tikka masala.

It is everything you want tikka masala to be: packed with flavor, with just enough browned bits on your chicken to keep it interesting, tangy but also rich, with that signature bronze-orange tikka masala color. Scoop it up over hot rice with a shower of fresh cilantro and you are in tikka masala biz-ness.

The Secret Ingredient

Okay, you might have opinions about this, but personally I like to approach chicken tikka masala as a five ingredient recipe:

Chicken
Yogurt
Tomato sauce
Cream
Masala paste

Let’s talk about the masala paste. In order to approach this as a five ingredient recipe, we need to establish that one of the “ingredients” is a MASALA PASTE with lots of fragrant and punchy and deeply flavored ingredients.

You make this masala paste once, it is done in about five minutes, and then it lives in your freezer so that forevermore you will have the ability to make this chicken tikka masala as a – you guessed it – quick, easy, five ingredient recipe.

Are you following?

So the first order of business here is making the masala paste. Today. Right now. End of story. One five minute batch of masala paste = many batches of this five ingredient CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA with hardly any thought or effort.

How to Make Chicken Tikka Masala Happen

Step 1: Make very simple, very flavorful masala paste.

Step 2: Now that you are armed with masala paste, this is going to be shockingly easy. Marinate chicken with yogurt and masala paste.

Step 3: Brown your chicken. Here we’re showing it in an enameled pan, but with a few extra rounds of testing we’ve come to prefer a nonstick pan for this step. Take the chicken out.

Step 4: Add a little more masala paste + tomato sauce to the pan. There’s your sauce base. Now add chicken back in.

Step 5: Cream goes in sauce, sauce goes on rice, and all of it goes in mouth.

If you can, if you will, if you need good recipes that taste like your favorite Indian restaurant just came into your house, please make that masala paste which will transform into this sauce which will cover this chicken which makes the simplest chicken tikka masala happen in your life, in your very own home, on your very own couch in your very own sweats because HELLO.

Only the best for tikka masala.

Ways to Make Chicken Tikka Masala

This recipe is written to be done on the stovetop, but you could make it in the Instant Pot or a slow cooker for a more hands-off approach. I prefer the traditional stovetop version, but all ways are very delicious.

Check out the notes section of the recipe below for specific instructions for both!