For our project we did not change an ingredient, but a different aspect of the recipe.

The
butter chicken is put in a marinade for preparation. The purpose of the marinade is to make the
chicken more tender and improves its ability to hold moisture. The marinade is a salt based
marinade, this is important because the salt is what affects the tenderness and ability to hold
moisture. So what we decided to change was the length of time the chicken spent marinating.
We felt that this would have the most noticeable effect on the final product besides just
switching amounts of spices put into the curry.

The reason that this is happening is that the salt is attracted to the water in the meat.
The salt keeps the proteins from coagulating once the meat is heated. This is because the
positively and negatively charged ions of the salt attract the opposite sides of the amino acids,
which restricts them from being able to coagulate. Meaning the longer it marinates, the more
time the salt has to bind with the proteins making the meat more tender.

Our experiment was not the most successful when it comes to showing us conclusive
results. And unfortunately it barely helped us create a better product with the chicken. The three
test we ran gave us relatively similar results. Which was unexpected, based on our hypothesis,
we assumed that the chicken that marinated the longest would have the ideal attributes of
tenderness and moistness. What we ended up getting was three samples of essentially the
same chicken.