January 4, 2010

making paneer: add acid

Posted by dogpossum on January 4, 2010 8:38 PM in the category domesticity and fewd and gastropod | Comments (2)

Basically, to make paneer, you take the milk off the heat just as it boils, add the acid and stir while it's on a lower heat. It just separates like magic, greeny whey, white blobs of curd. Awesomely satisfying.

Following a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, I began by adding some white vinegar, even though I've added lemon juice in the past. It didn't work. As you can see at the beginning of the clip it just looks like sort of lumpy milk. But then I added a couple of table spoons of lemon juice and it DID work - the curds and whey separated just like magic. Or just like science, really.

I have to add here: this recipe (for both paneer and the final dish that I made) are from some charmingly annotated photocopied pages from a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook that Kirsty sent me aaaaaaages ago. As in _years_ ago. Kirsty is my first choice for recipe-book-testing. I gave her my mega Jaffrey recipe book and told her to 'find good stuff' because I couldn't handle the text-heavy-ness of it. She found fully awesome stuff. But I think these photocopies were from another book.

Jaffrey is wicked cool. I find her recipes quite simple and easy to make, but the style of the directions can be a bit confusing. I think she's often making dishes from memory, so she might describe quantities in a mixture of teaspoons, cups, ounces, grams, handfuls and so on. But it's worth dealing with this stuff for her lovely historical and social introductions and commentaries to recipes.

Posted by dogpossum on January 4, 2010 8:38 PM in the category domesticity and fewd and gastropod