Nothing beats a delicious, creamy curry made from scratch, and this creamy vegan tikka masala is no exception. Store-bought tikka masala paste can be great, but making it yourself is so easy and probably a lot healthier too! I personally like to know exactly what is going in my meals, and jarred sauces are typically filled with preservatives. Fresh ingredients all the way!

This recipe is super easy because it uses mostly pantry staples and you can alter it depending on what you already have. I’ve just used sweet potato but cauliflower, green beans, broccoli, or capsicum would also work great! I typically try to pack as many different vegetables as I can into recipes like this, especially when there’s no meat.

The details…

I am a huge fan of authentic Indian food, nothing beats a good butter chicken with garlic naan. But when cooking it at home, I find it hard to achieve the same Indian flavours – this recipe comes pretty close though. The paste comes together really easily and uses pretty standard ingredients – no wacky hard-to-find stuff. Simply chuck everything in a blender and pulse until it becomes a paste.

Then it’s as simple as combining everything in a large pot and letting it simmer for as long as you can! I recommend a minimum of 20 minutes but the trick with curries is the longer it simmers the more delicious flavour it will have!

Serving suggestion:

This creamy vegan tikka masala tastes great served with steamed rice and some naan or roti bread on the side. Roti is similar to naan bread, it’s a buttery Indian flatbread, perfect for soaking up our delicious curry sauce. Typically it only needs a just few ingredients – flour, salt, water, and lots of butter. You can find a great recipe for roti here. And a vegan version here.

Normally I would top my curries with a dollop of greek yogurt, thankfully there are delicious vegan alternatives for this! For this one I used the Cocobella Coconut Yogurt.

More vegetarian recipes to try:

If you give this creamy vegan tikka masala a try, let me know how you go in the comments!