An easy recipe for Butter Chickpea Curry made in the slow cooker! This cozy dinner is super simple to make using easy to find ingredients. It’s flexible too – you can add spinach, paneer or other ingredients if you wish.

If you’re feeling like a low effort curry night is in the cards, this is probably the easiest route I can offer you. Set your curry cooking in the slow cooker in the afternoon, and just let it do its thing. We have a short ingredient list and everything is easy to find (and cheap!) in Western supermarkets. The curry is deliciously rich and creamy, full of sweet fragrant spices, and easy to adapt with extra fillings if you wish.

This might not be the right slow cooker curry for you if you need something that can be left cooking all day long. Because we have a thick tomato sauce that could burn if it’s left unstirred for too long, and we don’t want our chickpeas to disintegrate, I only suggest 3-4 hours of total cook time. So it works perfectly when you’re home in the afternoon and want to get a head start on dinner. Ideal if you’re working from home or if you’re a stay at home parent taking advantage of nap time.

What to know about your ingredients

You’ll want salted butter to get the flavor spot on. And truthfully, we use a LOT of butter in this recipe to make it rich and flavorful enough to carry the chickpeas (which on their own are pretty bland).
Controlling the spiciness: Smoked paprika adds some smoky chili flavor but no heat – feel free to add 1/2 teaspoon of hot chili powder if you want to build in some heat. You can also swap smoked paprika for deggi mirch if you have it – this will give you a more vibrant sauce but will also make it more spicy .
We get lots of deliciously sweet flavor from the garam masala, but choose your garam masala blend wisely. You want to see sweeter spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom in the mix. Too often the cheaper supermarket blends lean more towards generic curry powder flavors, which wouldn’t give you the fragrant sweetness you’d expect from a butter masala style curry.
Jarred tomato passata is ideal for this sauce, thanks to its smooth, thick texture. Passata is known as tomato puree in the US.

Top tips for making curry in the slow cooker

Just to reiterate, this isn’t the best recipe to leave cooking all day while you’re out of the house. Unlike more liquidy recipes, this curry sauce is thick and tomatoey, which makes it prone to sticking and burning if it cooks too long without being stirred.
I recommend cooking this curry on LOW. The sauce is quite thick, and whenever I cooked it on HIGH, I would get some of tomato passata burning at the sides of the pan.

Slow cooker curries can have more muted flavors than stovetop curries if we add the spices and other ingredients all at the same time, because the spices don’t get the chance to “bloom” in oil or butter, a process that is important for optimal flavor. My solution is to place the ingredients in the slow cooker strategically: lay the sliced butter over the chickpeas and tomato sauce, then add the spices on top. As the butter melts, the spices will be absorbed into it, and then we mix the pot so that the spiced butter is integrated into the tomato sauce. It really does help!
Are you worried about cooking the chickpeas for so long? I find canned chickpeas pretty robust and have never had an issue with them getting too mushy or disintegrating into the sauce when they are left to cook for 3-4 hours. But if this is a concern for you (for example if you’re using home cooked chickpeas that you know to be very soft), you can certainly make the sauce on its own in the slow cooker and then add the chickpeas at the same time as the cream. I’ve done it this way and it works just fine, though I personally find when sauce cooks by itself, it’s more prone to burning because the slow cooker pan is a little under-full. So just stir it regularly.

If you like the sound of a creamy chickpea curry but decide that you don’t want to use a slow cooker, I do also have a stovetop chickpea curry recipe which might suit!

Variations to this Butter Chickpeas recipe

You can customize this recipe to your heart’s content!

If you’d like to pack in some greens, you can add some baby spinach to the pan – add it at the same time as the cream and it will wilt down a little by the time you serve it.
If you’d like to make this vegan, swap in your preferred vegan salted butter and some canned coconut milk or cream. If you don’t have a salted vegan butter, just add some extra salt to the sauce.

If you want to bring in another substantial filling, you can halve the chickpeas to create some extra space. Some ideas:

Fried paneer or halloumi: Stir in just before serving. (This is how I tend to make it for my family, since my kids won’t eat the chickpeas.)
Frozen vegetables: You will need to pre-cook them and then add them in alongside the cream.
Sauteed broccoli, eggplant or mushrooms: You can add these alongside the cream.

More Vegetarian Slow Cooker Magic

Dishoom Dal in the Slow Cooker

Slow Cooker Mushroom Risotto

Broccoli Stilton Potato Soup {slow cooker}

Slow Cooker Mushroom Soup