🍳 Friday Food

Home-Canned Butter Chicken

June 26, 2026  ·  Prep: 30 min  ·  Cook: 20 min  ·  Yield: 8 cups
Butter Chicken

Restaurant-quality butter chicken, ready on your pantry shelf–just open a jar, heat, and serve.

Why This Recipe

Convenience without compromise. The biggest barrier to eating well on busy nights isn’t skill or desire–it’s time. When you’re exhausted and the kitchen is a mess, takeout wins because it’s easy. Home-canned butter chicken changes that equation. A jar on the shelf is faster than any delivery app. Heat it for 4-5 minutes, stir through Greek yogurt or coconut milk, serve over rice. Dinner in 10 minutes, from scratch, from your own pantry.

The math works. A single order of butter chicken from a restaurant runs $15-20 before delivery fees and tip. This recipe yields approximately 8 cups of butter chicken for a fraction of that cost–especially if you’re using garden tomatoes, onions you bought in bulk, or chicken you stocked up on during a sale. Multiply those savings across a dozen jars sitting on your shelf, and the numbers add up fast.

Packaging waste disappears. Every takeout order comes with containers, lids, bags, napkins, utensils, and often a plastic bag to hold it all. Home-canned meals come in glass jars that you wash, refill, and use again next season. There’s no packaging to throw away, no plastic to feel guilty about, and no waste stream to manage.

The Story

There’s a moment in every home cook’s journey where the pantry stops being a place you store food and starts being a place you build meals from. For me, that moment came when I started pressure canning.

I’d been water-bath canning for years–jams, pickles, salsa, the usual. But pressure canning opened up a whole new category: shelf-stable meals. Real dinners, sitting on a shelf, waiting for the nights when you’re too tired to cook but don’t want to order takeout. Butter chicken was one of the first meals I canned, and it’s become a family favorite.

The recipe comes from foodpreserving.org, and it’s beautifully simple. Diced chicken breast in a spiced tomato sauce with onion, garlic, ginger, paprika, curry powder, and coriander. You cook it, jar it, pressure can it, and then you have dinner on the shelf for up to 12 months. When you’re ready to eat, you heat the jar contents and stir through plain Greek yogurt or coconut milk. Serve it over rice with some naan, and you’ve got a restaurant-quality meal in under 10 minutes.

Here’s my favorite modification: you can jar just the sauce without the chicken. Same processing times, same method, but now you’ve got a versatile pantry staple. When dinner rolls around, add fresh or frozen chicken (or skip the meat entirely and add chickpeas or vegetables), stir in your yogurt or coconut milk, and you’ve got a completely flexible meal. I keep both versions on the shelf–full butter chicken for the lazy nights, sauce-only for the nights when I want to improvise.

If you’ve been curious about pressure canning but haven’t taken the leap, this is a great recipe to start with. The results are delicious, the process is straightforward, and the payoff–a shelf full of homemade convenience meals–is hard to beat.

Key Details

Prep Time: 30 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Processing Time: 75 minutes (pints) or 90 minutes (quarts) | Total Time: approximately 2 hours 15 minutes | Yield: 8 cups | Storage: 12+ months

Sustainability Note: Every jar of home-canned butter chicken is a takeout order that doesn’t happen. No plastic containers, no styrofoam, no delivery emissions, no single-use packaging. You’re building a pantry of homemade convenience meals in reusable glass jars–real food, shelf-stable, ready when you are.

The Recipe

Ingredients

Amount Ingredient
2 tbsp Olive oil
2 cups Onion, finely diced
4 tsp Garlic, minced
2 tsp Ginger, minced
3 cups Crushed tomatoes
2 tsp Green chilies, finely diced (optional)
2 tbsp Paprika
2 tbsp Curry powder
2 tsp Kosher salt
1 1/2 tbsp Dried coriander leaves
1 1/2 lbs (750g) Skinless chicken breast, trimmed, cut into 1-inch cubes

To serve: Plain Greek yogurt, coconut milk, or sour cream–stirred in when heating.

Instructions

IMPORTANT: This is a pressure canning recipe. You MUST use a pressure canner. Water bath canning is NOT safe for this recipe. Follow all processing times and pressures exactly as written.

Prepare jars and lids:

  1. Prepare jars: Cover jars in water and boil for 10 minutes. Keep hot.
  2. Prepare lids: Place lids into hot (not boiling) water to heat through. Remove when ready to seal.

Make butter chicken:

  1. Saute aromatics: Over high heat, saute olive oil, onion, garlic, and ginger in a large pot until well browned. Remove from pan and drain briefly on a paper towel.

  2. Build the sauce: Return onion mixture to pot. Add paprika, curry powder, salt, coriander leaves, crushed tomatoes, and green chilies if using. Stir well, bring to a boil. Taste and adjust heat.

  3. Add chicken: Stir chicken cubes into sauce. Return to a boil, then turn heat off.

Can butter chicken:

  1. Fill jars: Immediately spoon hot chicken mixture into hot jars. Leave 1-inch headspace (critical for proper processing). Remove air bubbles, wipe rims clean, seal with hot lids. Do not over-tighten bands.

  2. Pressure can: Add 2 inches of boiling water to pressure canner. Load jars, put lid on. Over high heat, vent steam for 10 minutes once a steady stream appears. Add weight and bring to pressure: 10 lbs weighted gauge or 11 lbs dial gauge. Process pints: 75 minutes, quarts: 90 minutes. Turn off heat, allow pressure to return to zero naturally–do NOT force cool. Remove weight, wait 5 minutes, remove lid.

  3. Check seals: Cool jars overnight on a towel-covered surface. Next day, press center of each lid–should not flex. Label with contents and date. Store in a cool, dry, dark place. Use within 12 months.

To serve from a jar: Heat contents 4-5 minutes until hot. Stir in Greek yogurt, coconut milk, or sour cream. Serve over rice with naan, in a wrap, or alongside vegetables.

Notes & Variations

  • Brown the onions well: Don’t rush this step. Deeply browned onions are the flavor foundation of the sauce.
  • Sauce-only version (Jean’s modification): Can the sauce without chicken using the same processing times. When ready to serve, add fresh or frozen chicken, chickpeas, or vegetables. Flexible and practical.
  • Tomatoes: Fresh garden tomatoes work beautifully here. So does a good can of crushed tomatoes.
  • Green chilies: Optional. Leave out for mild, add more for heat. Taste the sauce before the chicken goes in–that’s your window to adjust.
  • Cream options: Homemade Greek yogurt is our first choice. Coconut milk keeps it dairy-free. Sour cream works in a pinch. Do not add dairy before canning.
  • Altitude adjustments: Adjust pressure for your altitude if above 1,000 feet.
  • Make it worth the canner: Double or triple the batch. If you’re heating up the pressure canner, fill it.

Serving:

  • Over basmati rice with naan
  • Wrapped in a flour tortilla
  • Alongside roasted vegetables

Storage & Make-Ahead

  • Sealed jars: Up to 12 months in a cool, dark place
  • After opening: Refrigerate and use within 3-4 days
  • Jar check: Before use, press the center of each lid–it should not flex. If it flexes, refrigerate and use immediately or discard

This post is part of our Indian Cuisine at Home series:

Related Friday Food Posts:

Related Wednesday Wisdom:

  • Why We Preserve — the full case for pressure canning as a sustainability practice
  • Seasonal Eating — building a pantry that connects to the garden

Equipment used in this recipe: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

A well-stocked pantry isn’t just about having food on the shelf–it’s about having choices. The choice to eat well on a busy Tuesday. The choice to skip the takeout container. The choice to reach for something homemade when the easy option used to mean processed or packaged. That’s sustainability you can taste.