Homemade Paneer

For second week of BM 26, I choose cooking from book. Hope you will be thinking it’s a easy topic but srivalli gave a twist, which made most of us to scratch the head. Here is the twist, from any three book, pick one ingredient and cook three different combination.

I choose paneer as my ingredient and combination are Basic, Rice and Indian sweet. Today it’s going to be basic, home made paneer. I haven’t tried paneer using curd, this is my first time it smelled awesome. Recipe source is Mrs S. Mallika Badrinath.

Ingredients:

Milk	1 litre
Fresh curd	1 cup

 

Directions:

1. Heat milk in a heavy bottomed vessel; keep stirring occasionally to avoid burning. When it starts to boiling, add curd and reduce the flame. Gentle stir the milk once or twice, when the milk curdles completely and water separated, remove from heat.
2. Cool for 5 minutes and strain through a muslin cloth or pour it over a sieve. Hand the muslin cloth till all water drains by itself (half hour).
3. Don’t squeeze, put this on a flat plate with cloth, press with another plate and put a heavy weight on top of it.
4. After one hour remove the weight and take the paneer out of the cloth and cut into desired shape.
5. The water which is drained from milk is called “whey” which is very nutritious, can be used in gravies and for roti dough’s.

Tips:

• Instead of curd you can use 2 Tablespoons lemon juice with 2 Tablespoons water to dilute it. Wash the paner in running water before hanging it. This is to remove the lemon smell. If you skip this step it will reflect in your dish.
• If your using this paneer to make sweet don’t put weight on the paneer after the water is drained by itself, gently squeeze once or twice and use accordingly.
• When shallow frying heat oil moderately, no smoke should be seen.
• After frying, plunge it to warm water until it is required, this helps to keep the paneer soft.
• Most of the paneer used gravies, it should be added before removing from heat, if the gravy is boiled after adding paneer then it will lose its shape.

 

 

 

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