Today’s dish is pretty flashy and celebrates all things green. We’re making the classic Indian dish: saag paneer! Recipe courtesy of Cook’s Illustrated.
The first step is making the cheese. That’s right, for the second time, we are MAKING cheese at Chez Venza. This is surprisingly easy to do and only requires 3 ingredients: whole milk, buttermilk, and salt. I’m not even sure the salt is necessary, but it sure makes it taste good!
Bring 3 quarts whole milk to a boil. Then add 3 cups buttermilk and some salt and let it sit for 1 minute.
Presto! Curds. The buttermilk curdles the milk and separates the milk solids from the whey.
The mixture is strained through a colander and cheesecloth (yes, cheesecloth! For cheese!)
And then you twist it up into a tight little bundle in order to squeeze out the rest of the liquid. See first there was WHEY and now there’s NO WHEY! Whey? NO WHEY!
And then it gets squeezed a little more between 2 plates and a heavy pot. This sits for about 45 minutes and then it’s done. So easy!
At this point you can take it out of the cheesecloth and cut it into cubes. Or you can just wrap it up and put it in the fridge and snack on it whenever you want. The temptation was great, but we powered through and only snacked on a tiny bit of it. Chef’s prerogative, right?
Next up is all the green stuff. This recipe called for an even split of spinach and mustard greens. If you’ve never seen a mustard green, this is what it looks like!
We microwaved the spinach and mustards for a few minutes in order to jump-start the cooking process. A whole bowl of greens wilts down pretty quickly.
Some of the greens get chopped up and reserved for later. The rest of it is going to be pureed in a blender. But we’ll get to that later.
Now we spice things up a bit with some good ol’ spicy spices.
The spices are first “toasted” with some butter in a skillet. Then you add a diced onion and cook it down for a bit. Then add jalapeno, garlic, ginger, and canned tomatoes. This cooks for awhile until all of the liquid is cooked out and you have a nice flavorful sauce.
To the blender! The wilted greens, half of the onion mixture, some chopped cashews, and a cup of water get pureed.
And then you add the puree back to the sauce pan. Isn’t that delightfully green?
Stir together, along with a cup of buttermilk and the chopped greens we reserved earlier. The buttermilk makes the sauce creamy and tangy.
Remember our homemade cheese? It gets cut up into cubes and then added to the sauce.
And just in case we didn’t have enough green stuff in our meal, we made rice with peas and some raisins.
Garnish with cilantro, cashews, and some naan.
My batik sitar player now presents you with this lovely dish of saag paneer. Enjoy!
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