Well, yes there is a lady that is popularly known as the Butter Chicken lady. Are your mouths watering yet?
During the last spring, Urvashi Pitre, a Dallas-based food blogger raised in Pune, India, posted a recipe for butter chicken to the Instant Pot Community Facebook group, a million-member discussion board dedicated to the cultishly beloved pressure-cooking gadget.
The creamy, fragrant tomato stew is a staple of Indian restaurant cooking, but it is traditionally labor intensive to make, requiring the meat to marinate overnight and simmer for as much as an hour. It can also, if prepared poorly, yield gloopy, greasy sauce and dry, overdone chunks of chicken. Pitre’s recipe, called “Instant Pot Keto Indian Butter Chicken,” vastly simplified the process: add spices, chicken, and tomatoes to the machine, set it on high pressure for ten minutes, then blend the sauce with butter and cream, and here is your BUTTER CHICKEN! The results were vibrant and complex, the chicken perfectly tender, the sauce velvety smooth and redolent of earthy garam masala.
Within a few months of posting her viral chicken recipe, Pitre had landed a book deal for the “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook,” which was released in September, 2017, by Rockridge Press, Pitre’s book, which is officially endorsed by Instant Pot, includes recipes for making dal without pre-soaking the legumes; homemade paneer, an Indian cheese, in about fourteen minute and biryani, a complex rice dish that’s typically reserved for special occasions.
During a telephonic interview with The New Yorker, Pitre said, “There are so many Indians who grew up in India knowing how to cook, but who no longer have time to cook using traditional methods, or second-generation Indians whose parents cooked Indian food but never taught them,” she said. There are so many Indians who grew up in India knowing how to cook, but who no longer have time to cook using traditional methods, or second-generation Indians whose parents cooked Indian food but never taught them.”
Many of them approach her recipes warily at first, skeptical that a dish whipped up in fifteen minutes could qualify as authentic Indian cooking. “But, as soon as they’re able to reproduce a dish they grew up with because of me, they’re totally committed,” she said. And even if traditional cooking techniques are being lost, she told me later, by e-mail, “I think what mothers and grandmothers would rejoice in is that the traditional tastes are now being passed on.”