Not to be confused with Chicken tikka. For the Italian dish, see Badam toffee marsala.
The sauce is usually creamy and orange-coloured. The dish was popularised by cooks from India living in Great Britain and is offered at restaurants around the world. Chicken tikka masala is composed of chicken tikka, boneless chunks of chicken marinated in spices and yogurt that are roasted in an oven, served in a creamy sauce. Glasgow as the city of origin. Chicken tikka masala may derive from butter chicken, a popular dish in the northern Indian subcontinent.
The Multicultural Handbook of Food, Nutrition and Dietetics credits its creation to Bangladeshi migrant chefs in Britain in the 1960s. Historians of ethnic food Peter and Colleen Grove discuss multiple claims regarding the origin of chicken tikka masala, concluding that the dish “was most certainly invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef. Another explanation is that it originated in a restaurant in Glasgow, Scotland. Chef Anita Jaisinghani, a correspondent in the Houston Chronicle, wrote that “the most likely story is that the modern version was created during the early ’70s by an enterprising Indian chef near London” who used Campbell’s tomato soup. Rahul Verma, a food critic who writes for The Hindu, said he first tasted the dish in 1971 and that its origins were in Punjab, India.