Can Tikka Masala Simmer Sauces Taste As Good As Takeout?

The Gymkhana simmer sauce tasted exactly like what I’m craving when I’m craving Indian takeout.

It was the most expensive one I tried (it cost three times as much as the cheapest, the Good & Gather). It also looked and smelled the most restaurant-y from the moment you opened the bottle. The tikka masala was thick and smooth, with a velvety texture. Caramelized onions gave it a mellow sweetness and jamminess, and there was just the right balance of cumin and coriander, with cardamom giving it a slightly floral quality. This sauce gets the luxurious silky restaurant-style texture by using a combination of cashew, khoya (milk solids), cream, and butter. The cashews gave it a lightness that the solely dairy-based sauces, like the Maya Kaimal and Kalustyan’s, did not have.

“I don’t think I could figure out how to replicate this at home,” said my husband, the more accomplished cook in our home.

When you open the Maya Kaimal tikka masala, there’s some separation to the sauce with oil pooling at the top, but it quickly blends together once on the stove and has a velvety finish similar to the Gymkhana. This sauce uses a lot of dairy but no cashews to get its creamy texture. It also uses tapioca starch as a thickener and lemon-juice concentrate, which adds citrus notes to the flavor. My father noticed a mild touch of sourness that he enjoyed; he thought it added an interesting layer to the taste. I’d happily use this if the Gymkhana weren’t available, but I prefer the use of cashews for a lighter sauce (and lighter-feeling meal).

My mother, who helped me learn how to cook Indian food in an American kitchen, said this one tasted the most home-cooked, like it had been slowly simmering for hours, and was the right combination of sweet and spicy. The cumin, cinnamon, and clove gave this one a bit more warmth than the others.

Interestingly, my 9-year-old daughter, who spends a lot of time in Mumbai and New York, said she felt the Maya Kaimal was something she would eat in an Indian restaurant in America, while the Kalustyan’s (more on which below) tasted more like something she would get in a restaurant in India. My 7-year-old licked her lips and asked for the leftovers for her camp lunch the next day.

Trader Joe’s tikka masala is the only vegan one on the list. The most unusual ingredient in it is ground watermelon seeds, which give the sauce its creaminess and are used in very traditional Indian households — I’ve read about them but have never actually seen them in action.My mother and my younger daughter have dairy intolerances, so they were particularly thrilled about the vegan option, and my mother was impressed by how creamy it tasted without any dairy.

She thought it was a good base but would add more flavor to it, “either chile or some garam masala,” she said. I actually think it works on its own, especially if you’re also feeding children.

My husband noted that this one “doesn’t feel artificial, maybe because it’s not disconcertingly smooth. Often with ready-made things, I feel I can tell they’re ready-made, but this tastes like something we could make at home.”

The Kalustyan’s simmer sauce is darker and thicker, and it smells more buttery as it simmers. This one had an overpowering bitterness, and I found myself preferring the sauces that were lighter on the fenugreek.

My husband said it was “less aromatic than the Gymkhana and Maya Kaimal, not as distinctly Indian — it could almost be Mexican.” And my mother found this one to be too creamy and heavy. It veered into butter-chicken territory: Butter chicken relies more on creaminess and doesn’t use onions, while tikka masala is meant to be less buttery, with a greater emphasis on complex spices and aromatics. With this one, the fenugreek threw all the other spices out of balance.

My father said the sweetness in this one seemed more constant (it contains honey), making it almost dessertlike, and he preferred the “sparks of sweet” in the others. This is not one we would probably get again.

The Target Good & Gather ingredient list has by far the most sodium — 770 milligrams per half-cup serving (the FDA recommends limiting sodium to 2,300 milligrams a day) — and lots of ingredients the others did not have, like carrageenan, cultured dextrose, guar gum, maltodextrin, and polysorbate 80.

It is, however, the cheapest, and, frankly, it tasted pretty good. It was surprisingly fresh, simple, light, and accessible — in that it was not as complex as the others. While it had quite a strong aroma of cumin, coriander, and chilli, it was harder to pinpoint those spices when tasting it. “It’s a solid backup since it’s so easily available for most people,” said my 12-year-old nephew, “but it tastes a bit like salsa.” I agree that it doesn’t taste distinctly Indian.

My father also thought it tasted “more generic. There are no elements of surprise, but it tastes lighter.”

And it’s all true: This one tastes just fine, but the sodium content and ingredients make it the weakest of the lot for me.