A popular adage is that the internet never forgets. This may or may not be true. But here’s another adage that may be more suited to our times: Social media never remembers.
This is especially true of food, now that it has become a social-media obsession. For instance, there has recently been a huge hoo-ha about butter chicken ice-cream. The sudden surge of interest and the many polarising responses that followed the posting of a video on Instagram from a ‘content creator’ called Juliette Moreno came from people who don’t know any of the background.
In the video, Moreno takes butter chicken, adds lots of dairy, keeps the mixture in the fridge overnight and then puts it in an ice-cream maker.
And Hey Presto! She ends up with Butter Chicken Ice-Cream.
On social media, the common response is that this is a terrible, yucky idea. Who could imagine an ice-cream that tastes of butter chicken? The world doesn’t need such a weird dish. And so on. None of this should come as a surprise to Moreno, who says in her bio that she likes ‘cooking without rules’.
What fun, yeah?
Well yes and no. Because Butter Chicken Ice-Cream is an old dish, and there are actually quite clear rules about how it is made. And all savoury ice-cream, which dates back a couple of centuries, also follows long established rules.
To take Butter Chicken Ice-cream first. I remember it from Rasoi, the Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London, where it first went on the menu 22 years ago.
It was one of the many dishes that established chef Vineet Bhatia as one of the world’s greatest exponents of modern Indian cuisine.
Vineet had been fascinated by the idea of savoury ice-creams that used Indian flavours for nearly a decade before he served his take on Butter Chicken Ice-Cream. When he was chef at London’s Star of India as far back as 1995, he experimented with ice-creams that captured the flavours of Punjabi kadhi and south-Indian coconut crab. He was as adventurous with sweet ice-creams. His kheer ice cream remains an under-praised Indian culinary classic.
At one level, making an ice-cream is as simple as putting something into a professional ice-cream machine. As chefs have discovered, you can freeze anything. Now that it’s easy to buy relatively inexpensive versions of those professional ice-cream machines aimed at the home cook, anyone can make any kind of ice-cream using the ingredients of their choice. The next time you have some curry left over, you can just put it in a machine and create your own ice-cream.
Except that it probably won’t be any good. The trick with an ice-cream is not how good your machine is (though of course, that matters) but how good your ice-cream mixture (custard, crème anglaise or whatever you want to call it) is.
Vineet’s Butter Chicken Ice-Cream worked because, through trial and error, he got the mixture right. He had the sense to focus on the makhni sauce and to throw out the chicken, which would lose flavour and texture in an ice-cream machine.
In the UK, where his dish was invented, eggs are an integral part of good ice-cream. But Vineet wanted to make a vegetarian ice-cream, so he threw out the eggs. Instead, he added lots of cream and then reduced the sauce to concentrate the flavour. The cream provided the fat that made up for the absence of egg.
The ice-cream was such a hit that it has now, as Vineet says, ‘been done to death by everyone’. You may have had a version somewhere (one that omits all mention of its true creator, of course) or you may have come across the original at one of the three restaurants Vineet runs for the Oberoi group in India.
I still remember being blown away when I first tried it at Rasoi. Because Vineet is a cerebral chef, he had asked himself the central question: How is a makhni sauce ice-cream better than just a normal butter chicken? His answer was to exploit the versatility of the sauce and demonstrate that it could work in different contexts. At Rasoi, he served it alongside a hot mushroom khichdi (a khichdi not a risotto; Vineet was the first chef to put khichdi on a fine dining menu), with a mushroom papad. He wanted, he says now, to put hot and cold in the same course, while keeping the components distinct.
Hot and cold in the same course?
We are in Heston Blumenthal territory here. And indeed, Heston is the man who taught Western chefs that savoury ice-creams could be delicious. The basic idea of a savoury ice-cream is not new: There are references to cheese ice-creams dating back centuries and Parmesan ice-cream is now a menu cliché.
But Heston was not trying to rediscover savoury ice-creams when he created Bacon And Egg Ice-Cream, one of his most famous dishes. Ironically enough he was actually trying to create an ice-cream that was less eggy overall. He succeeded, by changing the technique of making the mixture. (He pasteurised the custard at a lower temperature, so that the eggy flavour came in bursts.)
The ice-cream gave him a strong emotional reaction and took him back to childhood memories of breakfast on holidays with his parents at a hotel in Cornwall. That breakfast memory led him to add bacon to the ice-cream. But even then, I don’t think he realised that he had created a classic, because he served the ice-cream as just a single spoonful.
But bit by bit, the dish evolved. His pastry chef Jocky Petrie (now back with Heston as culinary director of all the restaurants in the group) told him that the ice-cream looked like scrambled eggs, which led Heston to rethink the presentation.
Then, he began using liquid nitrogen to make the ice-cream in seconds. (Heston’s The Fat Duck was the first restaurant in the world to use liquid nitrogen.) At some stage, he injected the ice-cream into egg shells and served it as a ‘Oh wow!’ dish. And it has kept shape shifting.
But I think Heston still values the techniques he perfected and the emotion the dish evokes much more than the revolution it set off in how the world looks at ice-cream. As he says, “Way more than science and technique, cooking is about emotion”.
And perhaps Heston is right to take the view that emotion is crucial to a dish. Foodies may sneer at the social-media fuss over Butter Chicken Ice-Cream from people who don’t realise that it is actually quite an old dish. But the fuss demonstrates that, even in this era of low attention spans and zero context, it is emotion that commands the most power.
Announce that you have done something new with butter chicken, and suddenly everyone will be moved enough to comment and of course, to rave and rant! Because ultimately, it’s about emotion.
From HT Brunch, March 14, 2026
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