Paneer cheese

My husband, Joe, has made mozzarella cheese a few times now.  It turns out that it's kind of a particular process with several steps, and you really have to be careful about measurement of ingredients and temperature.  It also can be more challenging to try to find citric acid powder and rennet tablets.

So imagine my delight when paneer was so easy to make in comparison!  Paneer is a white, hard cheese found in many Indian dishes. It kind of looks like tofu cubes in some of the curries it's made in, except, well, it tastes like cheese!  You can also pan fry paneer (similar to tofu) if you want it browned.

So here we are, to the easiest cheese recipe ever!

Ingredients:

1/2 gallon of milk (you can use whole milk, but I used 2%. Next time I may try 1%.  They say that skim milk is not recommended though)

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (I think that fresh squeezed works best. If you choose to use the bottled stuff, you may have to play around with the recipe a bit)

Directions:

Heat the 1/2 gallon of milk in a saucepan over medium heat.  Be sure to stir it often, so you don't burn the milk on the bottom.  When it finally comes to a good boil, remove it from the heat and pour in the lemon juice.

Gently stir the lemon juice in.  It will start to curdle the milk immediately, and separate it into curds and whey.  Gently stir for a bit, and then let it sit for 5-10 minutes.

Gently stir once more.  You should have a lot of curds now!  Put a double layer of cheesecloth over a fine mesh strainer and place them both over a bowl large enough to hold all of the whey liquid.  Carefully pour the curds and whey from the saucepan into the cheesecloth.  Squeeze all of the liquid from the cheesecloth that you can.  Either toss the whey or use it another recipe (I used it the next day to make roti bread).

Take your curds in the cheesecloth and gently rinse over the sink with tap water.  Squeeze to get all the liquid out, and then put the cheesecloth and strainer back over the bowl and let it sit a few minutes.  I put a paper towel and a heavy can of beans over top to help force liquid through.

Then, put some paper towels on a dinner plate, put your cheesecloth and curds on top, and cover with some more paper towels.  Place another dinner plate on top, and then on top of that, some heavy canned goods (I used a big jar of spaghetti sauce and 4 cans of beans).  Leave it out like this for 1-2 hours, then wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate.  

freshly made paneer!

You can then use the paneer in your favorite paneer recipes.  One of my faves is palak paneer!