Butter chicken too tomatoey

Any time you find a tomato based food item "too tomatoey" you're more than likely tasting the acidity of the tomato products. I always add a pinch of sweetener to any tomato based dish I make. And why you often hear of somebody's secret ingredient in a chili cook off to be something with sugar in it like peanut butter or chocolate or honey. Start with a teaspoon of honey, sugar, brown sugar, agave nectar, etc, and go from there. Also, try using coconut milk as the cream butter chicken recipes call for, as that may also alter the taste to conform to what you are accustomed to.

I used to always have this problem cooking tomato-based curries. To balance out tomato-ness, you either need something bland like dal, something with body and sweetness like onion (I also usually add a little palm jaggery or coconut sugar to wet curries and other sauces that have tomatoes), or some oily fatty creamy rich stuff (or all of them :D). I watched the video and I noticed that the tomatoes he used were really dry, and the tomato puree he used was thin (not very concentrated), so if you have juicy tomatoes and concentrated tomato puree you should probably use less. If you want to make the dish lower in fatty ingredients like butter, oil, yogurt and cream, you need to reduce the quantity of tomatoes to avoid it tasting too acidic.

I researched quite a bit and found that the longer you cook tomatoes the more you cook out the tomatoey flavor. Cooking 8-10 fresh tomatoes for fifteen minutes is not nearly enough. It needs to be cooked for at least 45 min if not 1-2 hours. That reduces it to near a paste and then you lose that tomatoey flavor.

There are two variations in tomatoes. One is highly acidic and another one is sweeter. I generally find tomatoes which are not elongated but not round comes with sweet notes.

Tomatoes to butter chicken are added to balance sweet and sour. If your sauce happens to be of more tomato flavour make sure you try to cook puree in oil before adding spices. Once you see tomatoes with no raw flavour, you can add spices and chicken pieces.

To keep the consistency of the sauce, reduce the number of tomatoes and add 5-6 cashew kernels to make a thick sauce.