Chicken Tikka Masala

Before it had a sauce, Chicken Tikka was cooked dry and charred in a tandoor. On its way from Delhi to curry houses in Scotland and England, it picked up a spiced tomato gravy, and more than one kitchen has a fair claim to that moment. Chicken Tikka Masala is Indian food that kept evolving as it traveled, and each place it passed through changed it.We follow that journey from a tandoor kitchen in Delhi to a Glasgow legend involving a tin of tomato soup, and to the foreign secretary who called it a true British national dish. Then we cook the home-style version, test a long-held belief about the yogurt marinade against a 2023 lab study, and name the ingredient most home curries are missing. A maple-syrup smell that hung over Manhattan in 2009 leads back to one of the finishing spices. There's no alcohol in the dish this week, so we save it for the drink alongside.This week's cocktail is the Masala Mango Lassi, a mango lassi blended with cardamom, salt and dark Demerara rum.For the full recipes and more, become a premium subscriber at https://sauced.supercast.com/Follow us on Instagram: @sauced.podThanks to all of this week's partners:Palomo Mezcal: https://pkgdgroup.com/mezcal-palomoUnderberg: https://underbergamerica.com/