A delicious Indian dish featuring spinach and cheese
Palak paneer is a lightly-spiced Punjabi dish that will have you enjoying spinach so much your friends will think you’re Popeye.
Palak paneer (pronounced pah-luck puh-near) translates to “spinach cheese”—it’s not a great translation, but there it is—and refers to a dish that you eat with naan, roti, or some other type of flatbread.
Paneer, as explained in my recipe for chilli paneer, is a compressed cottage cheese that does not melt when it is heated. In this way, it acts more like tofu, but tastes dairy-based and, in my totally biased opinion, tastes way better than tofu.
As a kid, palak paneer was always my favourite thing to order at an Indian restaurant. When I became interested in cooking, I spent years making different versions of palak paneer to get it to taste like it does at a restaurant.
For something that sounds so simple, it was absurdly difficult to make well. I tried using fresh spinach, canned spinach, and baby spinach; I tried deep-frying paneer, baking paneer, and pan-frying paneer; I followed recipes I found online, in cookbooks, and from acquaintances who didn’t believe in measuring ingredients. I failed many times. Even though everyone who tried my attempts said they were good, something tasted off to me.
Finally, after maybe a decade of attempts—yes, a decade—I found a recipe by Tarla Dalal, a famous Indian chef, that I was able to tweak to my liking. My version of palak paneer isn’t quite what you’d get at a restaurant, but I genuinely like it enough to stop trying to figure out this recipe. As an added benefit, it uses less oil than restaurants do, so it’s healthier as well.
Ingredients:
11 oz package of fresh baby spinach
1 brick of paneer, cubed (usually found near the yogurt at the grocery store)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon fresh ginger root, grated or blended
4 small to medium cloves of garlic, grated or blended
2 green chilli peppers, finely chopped or blended, or to taste
1/8 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 cup tomato puree (use whatever you have on hand; you can puree fresh tomatoes or use leftover tomato sauce)
1 teaspoon garam masala (should be available in the Indian section of grocery stores, at an Indian grocery store, or ordered online)
2 tablespoons sour cream, coconut milk, or cream
1 teaspoon salt or to taste
Directions:
Cut paneer in half lengthwise and then cut into nine to 10 slices widthwise so that you’re left with about 18 to 20 cubes.
Heat one tablespoon of vegetable oil in a frying pan over medium heat.
Add the paneer pieces to the frying pan and cook until golden brown on both sides (about four minutes per side, but keep checking on them). Once done, remove from heat and season with a pinch of salt. You may want to try a piece at this time just for “quality control,” joy-related purposes. Set cooked paneer to the side.
In a large pot with a lid, heat one tablespoon of vegetable oil over medium heat.
Add the prepared onion into the oil and cook until translucent.
Add the ginger, garlic, chilli peppers, and turmeric into the oil and cook for two minutes.
Add the tomato puree and cook for two more minutes.
Add the fresh baby spinach into the pot and cover with the lid until it begins to wilt a little (it should take a minute or so). Remove lid and stir well until all of the spinach has wilted. Remove the spinach from the heat.
Once the spinach has cooled a little, put it in a blender and puree it to your liking, but try not to over-blend it or it’ll be a soupy consistency.
Return the blended spinach to its pot and add the garam masala, salt, sour cream, and paneer pieces. Heat over medium heat until bubbling hot and serve with garlic naan (ignore the “heat in the oven for two minutes at 400 degrees” directions and just heat the naan in a frying pan until it’s as soft or crisp as you like it).
Finally, if you’d like to make a vegan version of this recipe, you can replace the paneer with roasted potatoes or tofu and the sour cream with coconut milk. You can also replace the paneer with chicken if you’re dairy-free.
Enjoy!
Photos by Mirali Almaula/The Ontarion.