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Chicken tikka masala is a curry dish of roast chicken chunks (chicken tikka) in a rich red, creamy, lightly-spiced, tomato-based sauce. The origin of this dish is disputed, with one widely-reported explanation claiming that the dish was conceived in a British Bangladeshi restaurant in Glasgow in the late 1960s,[1] when a customer, on finding that the traditional chicken tikka was too dry, asked for some gravy.[1] The chef supposedly improvised a sauce from tomato soup, yogurt, and spices.[1] This claim has not been incontrovertibly proven, but it generally accepted as an attempt to create an Indian dish that would appeal to the British palate.[1]
2. Composition: Chicken tikka masala is chunks of chicken that are marinated in spices and yogurt and then baked in a tandoor oven in masala ("mixture of spices") sauce.[1] There is no standard recipe for chicken tikka masala, with a survey finding that of 48 different recipes, the only common ingredient was chicken.[1] The sauce usually includes tomato and either cream or coconut cream and various spices. The sauce or chicken pieces (or both) are often colored with a hefty dose of tartrazine (food dye) or turmeric powder, mixed with tomato puree, to lend it a luminescent orange glow. Other tikka masala dishes replace chicken with lamb, fish, or paneer.
3. Popularity: Chicken tikka masala is served in restaurants around the world. A survey in the United Kingdom claimed that it is the country's most popular restaurant dish,[1] with one in seven curries sold in the United Kingdom being chicken tikka masala. The cross-cultural popularity of the dish in the UK led former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to proclaim it as "Britain's true national dish".[1]
