Skip to main content

Home made Paneer - A Tutorial



This weeks post was supposed to deal with a dessert made with Toddy palm Jaggery, but Murphy's Law  kind of kicked in, the one that goes on the lines of .. If you're desperately looking for something, You'll rarely find it, never mind if it stares at you in the face at all other times' . Yep.. spent an annoyingly frustrating afternoon turning the kitchen & the pantry upside down, only to discover that sometime during the past couple of months, the big bag had somehow been stuffed in the freezer, right next to the Flax oil.. so that will be a post of the next week.





Its nice to get back to informative tutorials once in a  while and the motivation for this post was my uber talented jewelry designing SIL Vidya, who creates  beautiful one of a kind jewelry for her online venture Kalli's Dreams



Discussing the nuances of making home made organic paneer, I  had an opportunity to revisit the simple pleasures of making this basic staple Indian Cheese from scratch.

Home made Paneer (makes ~ one 10 oz. block)

 

 You need:

1/2 gallon organic whole milk
1/2 cup Fresh squeezed Lemon Juice (~ 3-4 lemons)
1/2 cup water


Add the water to the a heavy bottom 5 quart pan and set to heat on medium- high. Add the milk into the pan (adding the milk directly to the pan & heating it tends to scorch the bottom resulting in brown bits of caramelized milk solids. adding the milk to water tends to minimize that).

Squeeze out the juice from 4 lemons. Strain to remove pulp and seeds. set aside. Moisten a large piece of cheesecloth & set over a mesh strainer. Set the strainer over a large container to contain the whey.
 


When the milk boils over, remove from heat & IMMEDIATELY add the lemon juice . Stir the milk to ensure that the acid is well mixed. You should see the milk curdle almost instantly. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes. Pour the curdled mix into the cheesecloth covered strainer.


Gather the corners of the cloth & Twist to squeeze out as much whey as you can. Take care, the whey is still scalding hot!



Once most of the whey has been squeezed out and the cheese is cooled down to a point where you can handle it with your bare hands, Gently untwist the cheesecloth and cover the ball of cheese with it.


Place a container over the cheese and weigh down with a heavy can until it completely cools. Walk away from the contraption, leave it alone to its own devices for the next 2 hrs!



Unwrap the cheesecloth, The texture will now be set, but yielding.


This is great if you're looking to crumble & shred it for your recipe.




To get a firm consistency for cutting into cubes & frying, wrap the round block of Paneer with some sturdy kitchen paper towel ( to wick away any stray moisture ) then tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate over night.


For some great Paneer recipes, Here are a few links:

A fabulous Kid Friendly treat from Monica Bhide
Manisha Pandit's Classic Recipe for Mutter Paneer 
and 
Palak Paneer


Bon Appetit











Comments

  1. Thats a beautiful block of paneer..perfectly made..

    ReplyDelete
  2. wow...perfect block of paneer..well explained!
    Prathima Rao
    Prats Corner

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yummilicious! I try with the UHT milk that i get here and the paneer turns out more crumbled. But i never gonna give up! And i have always thought that I need more juice of lemon than suggested in most cookbooks....you seem to have used as much :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. wow perfectly made paneer,very useful post...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks Pratibha, Prathima, Lata & Premalatha!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Gorgeous block of paneer! Thanks for the link love!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Manisha! Your mutter Paneer recipe is the de facto go to recipe at home.. It started with this very block of paneer.

      Delete
  7. Wish I had some of that paneer with me now :-). Lovely photographs too.

    Aparna

    ReplyDelete
  8. Very cool. I've never made it before but have always wanted to try it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thanks for the tutorial for this staple Indian cheese. It seems like there are some great recipes that use paneer. Great post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear feedback from you, your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sputtering back....

I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been

Product Review: Ninja Mega Kitchen system and a recipe for Masala Dosa

 One of the biggest reasons for attending conferences is the priceless experience of meeting fellow bloggers and get an invaluable exposure to all things  culinary. This includes vendors with new products to savor and get inspiration from. I had no complaints about whatever appliances I had for making traditional Dosa (Traditional South Indian rice & lentil crepes) batter, a sturdy tabletop stone grinder that you could add the Urad dal, turn the timer on , and 30  minutes later, come back to a container full of fluffy, batter with the consistency of whipped egg whites. The The cons of this is the cleaning up, of the various parts, the roller, the grinding bin, the multiple trays on which the rollers need to be placed while transferring the rice & lentil batter, the invariable drips of thick batter on the counter.... you get the point, It takes quite a bit of time. I was pleasantly surprised when the appliance company, Ninja asked me if I'd like to try any of their

Pickling & preserving the Buddha's Hand!

 Got your attention with that sacrilegious sounding title on this post, didn't I? Well, I'm as spiritual as the next person out there, and never in my life will I ever commit that variety of Blasphemy, so nothing to fret about. I still wonder why these curious looking citrus entities (other than the obvious visual reason) were called such. It turns out that these fruits are used as a religious offering to the Buddha. My neighboring Whole Foods Market (which is quite some distance away, in Princeton) had a stock of these weird looking citrus and I must have been the oddball customer who immediately went cuckoo on spotting them. Since I had never seen one before, I immediately went for the biggest fruit with the most tentacles (since they were sold as individual units rather than by weight) The first three 'tentacles' were peeled off for their zest, dried in the oven and went into making a citrus salt for my Food52 Secret Santa .     Making