Urvashi Pitre’s Instant Post recipe for butter chicken earned her a following for her easy versions of classic Indian recipes.Photograph by Melina Hammer / Courtesy Callisto Media
This post has been updated to include Urvashi Pitre’s recipe for Instant Pot butter chicken.
Last spring, Urvashi Pitre, a Dallas-based food blogger raised in Pune,India, posted a recipe for butter chicken to the Instant Pot CommunityFacebook group, a million-member discussion board dedicated to thecultishly beloved pressure-cooking gadget. The creamy, fragrant tomatostew is a staple of Indian restaurant cooking, but it is traditionallylabor intensive to make, requiring the meat to marinate overnight andsimmer for as much as an hour. It can also, if prepared poorly, yieldgloopy, greasy sauce and dry, overdone chunks of chicken. Pitre’srecipe, called “Instant Pot Keto Indian Butter Chicken,” vastlysimplified the process: add spices, chicken, and tomatoes to the machine(onions, she wrote, would be “heresy, y’all”), set it on high pressurefor ten minutes, then blend the sauce with butter and cream, and presto!The results were vibrant and complex,the chicken perfectly tender, thesauce velvety smooth and redolent of earthy garam masala. The recipequickly became one of the Facebook group’s most popular posts, and Pitrebecame known in “I.P.” circles as the Butter-Chicken Lady.
Pitre, a fifty-one-year-old mother of two and a scientist by training,purchased her Instant Pot in 2012, right before she and her husbandunderwent gastric-sleeve surgery. She kept a blog, Two Sleevers, whereshe tracked her diet and weight loss with chatty good humor (“I’ve LostThe Equivalent Of A Two-Year Old In Weight…What Have YouLost?”),and she posted recipes occasionally to the Instant Pot Facebookgroup—low-carb shrimp scampi, keto-friendly pork chile verde. But thebutter chicken caught on in a way none of the others had. The pressurecooker has long been a staple of Indian households, used primarily formaking rice and dal (lentils)—its whistling noise, in Pitre’s words, a“harbinger of mealtimes.” The Instant Pot, she realized, was an evenmore natural match for Indian cooking, with settings for stewing meats,cooking lentils, beans, and rice, and even making yogurt.
Within a few months of posting her viral chicken recipe, Pitre hadlanded a book deal for the “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook,” which wasreleased in September, 2017, by Rockridge Press, the publisher of thebest-selling “The Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook.”Pitre’s book, which is officially endorsed by Instant Pot, includesrecipes for making dal without pre-soaking the legumes; homemade paneer,an Indian cheese, in about fourteen minutes; and biryani, a complex ricedish that’s typically reserved for special occasions, in just fiveminutes (the secret is adding the rice in a thin, even layer on top ofthe vegetables, and then using the manual setting to cook the biryani onhigh pressure). Pitre is not the only food blogger to exploit theInstant Pot’s potential for Indian cooking. According to arepresentative from the company, India is among the most activecountries on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group; at least twelveother cookbooks are devoted to I.P. Indian. But Pitre, who writes withwonky approachability and a droll willingness to answer just about anyquestion (Q: “My family hates curry. Should we still try this?” A: “Ifall else fails, lie to your family and say this is an Italian. . .dish andsee if they notice.”) has gained the most mainstream appeal. Herbook has more than a hundred thousand copies in print.
In a recent phone conversation, Pitre, who speaks in polished,British-inflected tones, told me that her most hard-earned fans areher fellow-Indians. “There are so many Indians who grew up in Indiaknowing how to cook, but who no longer have time to cook usingtraditional methods, or second-generation Indians whose parents cookedIndian food but never taught them,” she said. Many of them approach herrecipes warily at first, skeptical that a dish whipped up in fifteenminutes could qualify as authentic Indian cooking. “But, as soon asthey’re able to reproduce a dish they grew up with because of me,they’re totally committed,” she said. And even if traditional cookingtechniques are being lost, she told me later, by e-mail, “I think whatmothers and grandmothers would rejoice in is that the traditionaltastes are now being passed on.”
My aunt Sangeeta was sold on the Instant Pot after tasting rajmachawal (a red bean stew) made in the gadget at a friend’s house.Sangeeta is a first-generation Indian, known in our family for her loveof healthy, home-cooked food. Her signature dish is a fluffy,ginger-and-turmeric-tinged quinoa topped with sautéed shrimp. But she isa pediatrician with a busy schedule and limited patience for thekitchen. She recently purchased her own Instant Pot and discovered thatit made arhar dal (yellow lentils) as soft and creamy as her mother’sin just a few minutes. Last October, during the Hindu festival ofDiwali, a common time for Indians to do deep cleaning, she ceremoniallythrew out all three of her pressure cookers, then went out and bought asecond Instant Pot, plus a copy of Pitre’s cookbook. (My cousin Mehalater Snapchatted me a photo of my aunt’s twin I.P.s, with a caption:“My mom’s replacements for her children.”)
I spoke to other Pitre fans with similar conversion stories. ParveenTumber, an Indian-American lawyer from Sacramento, fell hard for Pitre’srecipe for kheema, a luxurious, aromatic dish of spicy ground beef,peas, and onions. The recipe typically involves standing over a pan andstirring the mixture for twenty minutes to prevent the onions and spicesfrom burning. Pitre’s version involves putting the ingredients into theInstant Pot, then cooking the whole dish for five minutes. “My husband’smom had been trying to teach me for a decade,” Tumber said, “and then Imade Urvashi’s version from the cookbook, and my husband said it’s evenbetter than my mother-in-law’s.” Pitre, she said, “walks you through theprocess in the way our mothers have never done.”
The one-pot kheema recipe was such a hit in the home of Fabiha Kumari,a Bombay-born consultant living in Virginia, that she bought a secondPot and a vacuum sealer and a separate freezer so that she could makeand store the dish in big batches. “Before that kheema, I had nevertasted anything that consistently good made by my hands,” she told me.“I was attempting to cook some version of food that should have beenIndian, but it was inedible. I didn’t like standing over the stove allday.” Pitre’s recipes, she said, have made the process easier, moreenjoyable. They’ve also upended the stereotypes about Indian cookingthat have made many Indians reluctant to embrace the food of theirelders in the first place. “There used to be all these stigmasassociated with Indian food: it smells, it’s all curry,” Kumari told me.Pitre’s recipes, she said, “eliminated a lot of that. For the firsttime, I am happy to be an Indian cook.”
Urvashi Pitre’s Instant Pot Butter Chicken
Serves four.
1 (14-ounce) can diced tomatoes (do not drain)
5 or 6 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon ground paprika
2 teaspoons garam masala, divided
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken (breasts or thighs)
4 ounces butter, cut into cubes, or ½ cup coconut oil
½ cup heavy (whipping) cream or full-fat coconut milk
¼ to ½ cup chopped fresh cilantro
1. In the inner cooking pot of the Instant Pot, add the tomatoes, garlic, ginger,turmeric, cayenne, paprika, one teaspoon of garam masala, cumin, and salt. Mixthoroughly, then place the chicken pieces on top of the sauce.
2. Lock the lid into place. Select Manual or Pressure Cook, and adjust thepressure to High. Cook for ten minutes.
3. When the cooking is complete, let the pressure release naturally. Unlock thelid. Carefully remove the chicken and set it aside.
4. Using an immersion blender in the pot, blend together all the ingredients intoa smooth sauce. Let the sauce cool for several minutes.
5. Add the butter cubes, cream, remaining teaspoon of garam masala, andcilantro. Stir until well incorporated. The sauce should be thick enough tocoat the back of a spoon when you’re done.
6. Remove half of the sauce and freeze it for later, or refrigerate for as long as threedays.
7. Add the chicken back to the sauce. Preheat the Instant Pot by selectingSauté and adjust to Less for low heat. Let the chicken heat through. Break itup into smaller pieces, if you like, but don’t shred it.
8. Serve over rice or raw cucumber noodles.
