Chickpea tikka masala: It's not traditional, but it sure tastes great
I once confessed that, as a lover of wordplay, I am drawn to every recipe I see whose name substitutes "chickpeas" for "chicken." When I recently ran into Chickpea Tikka Masala, I had to try it, even though I knew the "tikka" part of the name doesn't quite translate. (It means "pieces," and refers to the chunks of chicken in the original dish.)
It's a loose interpretation, to be sure, from Kathryne Taylor's "Love Real Food" (Rodale, 2017). Besides swapping in those chickpeas, she skips the cream in the sauce and uses coconut milk - like chickpeas, a beloved ingredient in India. Unlike the British-Indian dish, which requires marinating chicken in yogurt and spices and roasting it before adding it to the sauce, her version has you throw canned chickpeas right into the liquid. (It might seem similar to chana masala, arguably India's most popular vegetarian dish, but that curry has much more of a kick from fresh chiles, a tang from dried mango powder, and not even a lick of cream or cream substitute.)
Is it heresy to strip a traditional dish of so many essentials? I don't think so, especially in this case, because chicken tikka masala, according to most sources, is itself a loose British interpretation of an Indian favorite. Accounts vary, but in the famous 2001 speech in which he declared it "a British national dish," former foreign secretary Robin Cook said the masala sauce was added to India's chicken tikka "to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy."
For those of us who desire nothing more than an easy, quick, spicy, satisfying, plant-based curry, tradition can give a little. And so can the name.