Recipe 27: Saag Paneer (Jenny Huang for Saveur)
Creamy and dreamy!
After trying my hand at Priya Krishna’s Matar Paneer, I still had half a brick of this tasty cheese in the fridge just waiting to to properly utilized. While Indian-ish does include a Saag Paneer recipe, Priya uses feta rather than the traditional paneer. While her recipe is 100% on my to-do list, I want to make sure and do it with the intended feta. After a quick scroll through my Pinterest collection of vegetarian and vegan recipes, I found this Saag Paneer I had saved about a year ago juuuuuust before the pandemic closed the whole world down. Reading through the recipe, I was pleased to find that I also happened to have everything I needed to make it on hand. Done and done. (Also delicious by the way.)
SKILL RATING: Medium-Effort
This is a solidly medium-effort kind of recipe. Even if you do decide to go through the extra step of making the paneer from scratch. You can MAKE CHEESE AT HOME? You might be asking. Yes. Yes you can! I’ve done it and it’s pretty easy. I’d like to give this another go with the homemade paneer, but seeing as I already had it on hand it seemed a little silly to invest the time.
Anyway, the non-cheese-making part of the recipe is accomplished with a little chopping, cutting and frying cubes of paneer in ghee, and then simmering everything together for about 15 minutes. I only did a half portion of the recipe, so my cooking time was cut down a little bit by virtue of there being less volume in the pan. You can absolutely make this at home! I had some leftover rice to serve it with and toasted up a couple of roti to go alongside as well.
TASTE RATING: 5/5
So good! This was well-spiced and deeply flavored. With the combination of heavy cream and cheese fried in butter the meal is on the rich side, so a little goes a long way. But every savory bite is completely delicious. Looking forward to making this again! (After I try Priya’s version, of course.) Omit the paneer cubes and the spicy, creamy spinach on its own would make an elegant side dish for a fancy dinner.
Read my “Cook With Me This Year” post for background on my little kitchen project.