I'm Making Paneer for the First Time, and You're Gonna Watch

I picked up a book on cheese-making a couple of months ago, breezing through it, with lots of exclamations about which ones I would eat (all of them). Then I set it aside and sort of forgot about it, mainly because real cheese-making involves working with bacteria, which I need to do a little research on before I go investing money in cultures to make the cheeses I'm really interested in. 

This week, though, I ended up with a bunch of free time when my folks couldn't make it to town to visit, so I spread out my cookbooks and looked for something not too difficult, but that I hadn't done before. Paneer looked pretty easy to make. It's a soft cheese, so it doesn't require much besides the milk and the curdling agent, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I've never done this before, so I don't really know how it's going to turn out. These kinds of experiments are pretty much endurance trials for my fear of failure, so get ready for lots of emotional baggage, which we all know makes for great blogging.

Here's what you need:

1.5 liters whole milk

150 ml heavy cream

60 ml vinegar

cheesecloth

some ice cubes

That's it, fool! Actually, the book I was looking at only called for milk and not heavy cream, but my new favorite chef Harpal Singh (HIS SHOW IS CALLED SINGH AND COOK, Y'ALL) says to use some heavy cream, too, since you're looking for a good amount of fat to give the cheese a good texture. If Chef Singh says to do it, I'm doing it.

There are a few simple parts to making a simple, soft cheese like paneer.

-Heat the milk

-Curdle the milk with some sort of acid

-Separate the cheese curds from the whey

-Press and drain the cheese curd

So the first thing I did was put my milk and cream in a big pot and turn on the heat.

You want it to boil, so while I was waiting for that I was doing some prep work, because it seemed like the rest of it was gonna go quick.

I put cheesecloth in a strainer. This is where I will strain the curds into after I add the curdling agent

The paneer needs to have weight on it for a couple of hours, so we need some kind of set up to press it. Here's what I came up with:

The bowl underneath is to catch the last of the liquid squeezed out during pressing. Chef Singh says that on top of the cheese you want roughly 1.5 kg of weight per 1 liter of milk. I found a canister in my kitchen that weighed a little more than 2 kg and was the right diameter to fit into the strainer, so I went with it.

By now the milk and cream were about to boil, so it was time to get fucking serious.

Once it was at a full boil, I cut the heat and added my vinegar. I had extra vinegar on hand in case the curds didn't start forming. The amount of curdling is directly proportional to the amount of acid in your curdling agent. I could have used lemon juice, if I wanted, or any other acidic liquid, really. 

Here it is, curdling up:

I stirred it around to distribute the vinegar evenly, and once the curds were becoming fairly solid, I tossed in maybe six ice cubes. This slows the curdling process long enough to strain away the liquid. Did I let the curds form long enough? I have no idea. We'll see how I did in a few hours, I guess. It's probably like super fucked up, I bet.

Then I dumped it into the strainer:

I had a bowl underneath to catch all the whey, which is where most of the nutrients end up. You can make ricotta out of the whey (ricotta literally means, "recooked").

After letting it strain, I tied up the cheesecloth and put it in my makeshift press.

I put the canister on top of it and left it alone for two hours.

Check out all this whey I got!

It kind of tastes good, but also kind of tastes like someone threw up in my mouth. That probably says something about me.

Anyway, I sat around and worried about how this cheese was gonna turn out for a couple of hours, until it was time for me to actually look at it.

It's not actually gray, that's just the way the texture and shadow make it look in this light and with my awesome photography skills.

Not bad! It doesn't have much flavor, though, and the texture is pretty rough. I'd guess that I probably needed to let the curds set a little bit more before straining, also maybe I could have tightened up the cheesecloth a little bit to give the cheese a more uniform shape and put a little more weight on the cheese so that the proteins really held together. But it's cheese nonetheless, and I came through the whole experience without any major emotional trauma, which is enough for me.