No-butter Butter chicken

I had several butter chickens recently (altho none of them at an authentic Indian place): one was at Coles and another at Michael's Oriental. The former was surprisingly better than the latter but only because the latter was way too salty. His reasoning was that it needs to be salty in order to go with rich or naan but it is too salty for the way we prefer to eat it (with basmati rice). Maybe we're eating it wrong.

As far as cultural appropriation goes, I found this recipe from RecipeTinEats which is clearly also not Indian. However I wanted to use up the lingering homemade yoghurt I had and it is a simple well-explained recipe, so why not? TBH I didn't follow it very accurately because it was a weekday meal and I simply couldn't be bothered after a long day of work and dog minding. But as it was a good recipe, I'm putting it down here.

Served with store-bought naan (no judgement pls!)

Ingredients
Marinade
½ C yoghurt
1 tbsp lemon juice (I omitted because I don't like the sourness)
1 tsp tumeric powder (I omitted because I dislike tumeric)
2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp Asian chilli powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tbsp ginger, freshly grated
2 cloves garlic
1kg chicken thigh, cubed
Sauce
2 tbsp ghee, butter or veg oil (I used oil)
1 C passata
1 C double cream (thickened cream)
salt to taste (abt 1 tsp)
1 tsp sugar

Method
1. Marinade the chicken for at least 3 hours or overnight.
2. Drain the marinade and fry the chicken in batches until white. Do not pour in the marinade.
3. Add back the marinade and sauce ingredients except the double cream. Bring to a simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Add the double cream and simmer for another 5 to 10 minutes. The sauce will be very slightly lumpy and very slightly oily.
5. Serve on basmati rice or with naan.

Feedback
- Oddly enough, altho I didn't add any butter, I could taste and smell a buttery taste! I attribute it to the cream and yoghurt inclusions.
- The sauce has to be served sparingly with rice otherwise it is too salty (still!)
- Also interestingly, the Italians have a similar tomato-based cream sauce with pasta. (This is RecipeTinEat's version which she uses basically the same formula of passata with cream but adds parmesan and milk). We decided to serve this with pasta on the second night and it tasted far better than with rice!