Turkish Paneer Kababs

Hey everyone.. food-time!!

Here is a party appetizer I made recently, for a Turkish potluck with vegetarian guests! :)

Fig. 1. Turkish Paneer Kababs

The original recipe of my Kababs, Izgara Kofte from Turkish Cuisine, calls for meat. But I went ahead and made it with paneer to make it vegetarian. I served it with Roasted Garlic Hummus and pita. For my future reference, the above Turkish food blog has a great collection of recipes. I have also made Adana Kabab from there with minced chicken and that too turned out great, but I took no pics that time.

Paneer Stuffed Bell Peppers

Hey everyone..! Today's post is about bright and colourful Paneer Stuffed Bell Peppers! I read about these Stuffed Bell Peppers on Aparna's blog Apy Cooking. Aparna is a fairly new food-blogger, but she's no novice at cooking! She has several impressive recipes on her blog. Quite coincidentally, she and I started our blogs on the same day! So we have common blog-birthdates! :)

Fig. 1. Stuffed Bell Peppers

The interesting thing about this recipe is that Aparna has baked the dish and ever-so-casually combined tofu in the conventional Indian stuffing. :) Now I have never made anything with tofu (barely ever eaten it either). So tofu would be somewhat a leap of faith for me. I did, however, keep her recipe in mind for using with Paneer.

Have been on the lookout for paneer based recipes lately. In the past I have always eaten the typical Besan Stuffed Peppers, usually at parties. Aparna's idea of adding protein to the stuffing lingered in my mind. And when I saw a batch of fresh and vibrant bell peppers in the store, the image of Aparna's dish immediately flashed before my eyes. Here was a chance to make a fancy side-dish!

Palak Paneer / Aloo Palak

Hey everyone..! Today I am making Palak Paneer (Spinach with Cottage Cheese)... a quick and easy dish.

 Fig.1 Palak Paneer

Usually I make  Aloo Palak (Spinach with Potatoes). It is supposedly easier to absorb the iron from Spinach if you consume it with something which contains Vitamin C. Since potatoes have plenty of Vitamin C, I try to make Aloo Palak more often than Palak Paneer. It is the same recipe. In any case I like to add some lemon juice at the end. I hope that kicks in a tiny bit of Vit-C too. --OR-- I just force everyone to drink orange juice with the meal! ;)

Today it's the Palak Paneer version. Who doesn't like Paneer! This recipe is originally from Sanjeev Kapoor's book. Here I am making this by memory, since I don't have the book handy. I will update the post later if I find there are any changes in the original recipe.

Bengali Rasgulla

Hey everyone! Today's post is is my entry to Nupur's One Hot Stove event Blog Bites: Cookers. I don't have a rice cooker or slow cooker. So I am going to tell you about something I make in my basic pressure cooker - Rasgullas.

Fig. 1. Bengali Rasgulla

I never thought of Rasgullas as something to be made at home, least of all by me! They just sounded too exotic. It probably cannot be done, I thought. But once I made them, I was so glad I tried. I had been unnecessarily worrying about nothing!

However, instead of boast-blogging about "I made Rasgullas, it's all in the genes!!!" this Blog Bites event gives me the perfect opportunity to tell you all that the credit to making these goes entirely to Manjula of Manjula's Kitchen/ Bengali Rasgulla. She has videos on her website and youtube. And I used to watch those for time-pass... you know, just to watch something in the background while cooking-cleaning, when you don't have cable. I would never have actually considered making these if Manjula were not so sweet and encouraging in her video. She says at the end of the video, "..so how you can go wrong? You can never go wrong making the rasgullas!" :) By that she doesn't mean that it is an easy thing to make, but that one should buck up and try to do things that appear hard. It's possible that we were just worrying about nothing! And if indeed it turns out to be as tricky as it appeared, then we go about learning damage control with her help! ;) Never say never again!!!

The following is almost entirely her recipe. I have, however, made this a few times by now, so here I include just a few changes to adapt to my pressure cooker (which is smaller than hers and has a whistle). I must say that 4 out of 5 times I have made these they turned out perfect. (Once they turned out all squashy flat since I cooked them for too long, not knowing the correct whistle/cooking time-estimate. The gullas lost their patience in the cooker that time.)

Just fyi, I don't know what is the difference between Rasgulla and Bengali Rasgulla, which is what these are called on Manjula's blog. So if anyone knows, please enlighten me!

Ingredients:
2% milk - 4 cups
Lemon juice - 1/4 cup
Water to dilute lemon juice - 1/4 cup
Sugar - 1&1/2 cup
Water for sugar syrup - 4&1/2 cups

Procedure:
I - Making Paneer balls:
1) Boil 4 cups of milk. Add diluted lemon juice to it when boiling. Separate the paneer from the liquid by draining it using a cheese-cloth in a colander. Important - you need to wash the paneer at this point to ensure that no flavour of lemon remains in it.

2) Now this paneer is tied up tight in a cheesecloth and squeezed dry. Then this bundle is left under a heavy weight for about 1 hour to ensure that the paneer is dried well enough.

3) You will know if the amount of dryness is correct (say check after 1 hour) if you take a small marble-sized piece of the paneer in your hand and knead it with your fingers. After kneading for about 30 seconds, if the piece rolls into a nice smooth ball, then the paneer is ready. If your fingers feel wet then there is still water that needs to be drained. If the paneer is too crumbly, develops cracks in the ball, then you need to add a few drops of water. If you need more info, I have mentioned (in excrooociating detail) the method for making paneer in one of my previous posts.

4) If the paneer consistency is right, then proceed to take the entire lump of paneer on a separate plate or flat surface. Now knead the paneer very well, like dough, smearing the paneer flat over the plate and re-lumping/re-rolling it as you knead.

5) Now roll 16 small balls from this paneer. (Manjula rolls 12. My cooker has a smaller diameter than hers and the balls float on top. I make 16 smaller ones so that they don't stick to each other.)

 Fig. 2. Well-kneaded paneer balls show very few cracks

II - Cooking them in the pressure cooker:
1) Now heat sugar water in a pressure cooker (with the coil on somewhat high, to speed up). Make sure the sugar is completely dissolved.

2) Turn the coil heat to medium. Put rolled balls into lightly steaming hot sugar-water in the pressure cooker. Not quite boiling. Add about half a glass more of unheated water at this point (just so its not at boiling point) and close the lid of the cooker. No whistle put on at this time.

 Fig. 3. Paneer balls are put with sugar water to cook in the pressure cooker

3) Here I record what happened this time for me. Every time is slightly different. ;)  After steam started coming out of the cooker (took about 8-10 mins after putting on the lid), I put on the whistle. The 1st whistle went off after 9-10 mins. I turned off the heat. Left it on the hot coil till it cooled down. Usually I just wait for the steam to cool off on its own. (But for the record, this time I waited for about 15 minutes and then made the steam go out myself. I wouldn't recommend this at all for safety reasons!)

4) Rasgullas should be cooked at this point. Open the lid when cool and place rasgullas with some of the sugar syrup in a bowl to refrigerate for a few hours. Serve chilled.

 Fig. 4. Rasgulla paradise awaits!

Verdict:  Heaven!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paneer

I am making paneer today. I will refer to this post later on when I use paneer in spicy or sweet dishes. One new thing I am trying here is using viva brand towels to drain the paneer. Other than that this is just a normal paneer making recipe, so you can feel free to use cheese-cloth instead of these towels.

Fig. 1 Paneer

I really hate using re-used cheese-cloth to squeeze and drain water from paneer. It's not just the chore of washing it, which is quite alright if I wash one piece of cloth by hand. Its more that, after it is dried and I need to use it again, I worry.. how clean did I wash it? I don't like the questionable hygiene of re-used cloth touching food.

I have been using cheese-cloth all these years, it certainly works out well. And I did not know of any other option. I had heard about some sort of plastic paneer-maker thing, but as far as my friends have tried, it doesn't work out well. Recently I saw several advertisements for viva towels being used to make chakka (drain yogurt water), etc. So I wondered if I could give that a shot just once for paneer.  It's disposable, presumably cleaner than cloth I have washed by hand. But will tiny pieces/shreds of towel paper get into my paneer? Will the paper towel tear up?

So today I show results from my experiment of using viva towels instead of cheese-cloth to drain paneer. From the picture above you can see that one way or another I did get paneer at the end. ;)

Clarification:
Here I am making paneer for Rasgullas. So the measures for milk and lemon juice and "sitting under weight time" are according to that recipe.

Ingredients:
2% reduced fat milk - 4 cups
Lemon juice - 1/4 cup
Water - roughly 1/4 cup

Procedure:
1) Mix lemon juice and water to dilute the lemon juice. (This I do especially because it lets me use minimum lemon juice while making in the paneer, which is important if you intend to use the paneer for sweet dishes like rasgulla, sandesh, rasmalai, etc.)
2) Now keep milk to boil.

Fig.2 Milk being heated

3) When milk is bubbling, turn off the heat and add the diluted lemon juice. Add gradually. You might not need the entire 1/4 cup of lemon juice. (I didn't, but I'm afraid I cannot estimate how much I might have used on account of it being diluted.)
4) Stop when paneer floats to the top. Liquid below should be translucent. Now its time to drain out the liquid from this paneer.

Fig.3 Paneer floats to the top

5) I doubled two towels, wet them, squeezed out the water. The viva towels held fairly strong when I did that. Then I put them in a steel colander over a vessel (I like to collect the paneer liquid - is it called whey?)

Fig. 4. Towels waiting to drain paneer

6) Pour the paneer with its liquid into the colander. Paneer sits in the towel in the colander. Liquid gets collected in the vessel underneath.

Fig. 5. Towels drain paneer

7) Now I took the colander with paneer and washed the paneer with plain water once or twice (like washing rice or dal.) This is so the lemon flavour rinses out of the paneer. Need to wash well. Otherwise desserts made with the paneer may smell of lemon. (The lemony-ness is usually ok if paneer is being used in savoury dishes.)
8) Now I bundled up the towel with the paneer. I lightly squeezed out the paneer portion first (leaving top empty part slightly  loose, but not quite open so as to not allow paneer to fall out from there). Then I squeezed out the top empty portion of the towels. Repeated squeezing out the paneer liquid a few more times till I felt like I have given it my best. If you are too aggressive with this, the towels may tear. They are not ultra strong.
10) Now I left a heavy weight i.e. pressure cooker (my heaviest item) on top of the squeezed-paneer bundle for about 1 hour (for rasgullas). What did the paneer look like after the allotted 1 hour? Perfect consistency!! (For paneer pic, refer to picture called Fig.1.) No shreds of the towels have found their way into the paneer. And paneer is as dry as it needs to be. Just perfect! If you want to use paneer for some savoury dish, like palak paneer, then you can leave the weight on the paneer for a little longer, say 2 hours in all, to get  the paneer to be a little more dry/hard.

Verdict:
Is the viva towels experiment recommended? Umm.. let's see what we have..
Are there shreds of paper in the paneer? No. :)
Do the towels tear? They could tear if one is not very careful. So ensuring the dryness of paneer is a little bit tricky and requires a small amount of judgement.

So yes, I will use the viva towels again.

Something to note for future, I should get towels without coloured drawings on them. Who knows what kind of colour they use.. how fast it may be.. could be going into the paneer from the towels! Was not obvious here.

Feel free to weigh your options. My duty was to tell the world about my experiment. Spread information. Job done!

Happy cooking everyone!!