Try Using Feta at Saag Paneer for a Sharp Turn
Regardless of who you are and how you make your living, making dinner on the table can seem like an overwhelming task. After a day of crafting recipes ( or wrestling with my sad brain ), I’d rather swallow a piece of cheese or skip dinner altogether than mess up another dish. So I watch a lot of TV shows about food and buy a lot of cookbooks, always looking for something to distract me from my constant boredom on weekdays, dinners. Nowadays no one does it better than Priya Krishna.
Krishna’s new fantastic cookbook, Indian , is the best purchase I have made in a long, long time. Like any great cookbook, it’s more than a collection of recipes: it’s a crash course in Indian American ingredients and techniques, a microwave love letter, a homemade yogurt manifesto, and a family story that’s as moving as laughter. – loud fun. But what really sets it apart, for lack of a better word, is its incredible “readiness.” Most of the recipes were created by Priya’s mom, Rita, who fed her family of four and often hosted dinner parties while working full-time as a software engineer for airlines. This means that every single Indian -style dish is a quick, simple, repertoire-worthy public dish, which is exactly what every jaded home chef needs.
According to Instagram , the Indian poster isSaag Feta Ritu , a clever version of Saag Paneer that uses chunks of salted feta instead of soft and firm paneer, reminiscent of cheese curd. You can find the complete recipe in the book or here on Bon Appétit , and watch Priya prepare it in Bon Appétit’s test kitchen:
This substitution works: Not only is feta easier to find, but saltier, spicier, and more flavorful than paneer, and the texture you get when paired with gravy is hard to beat. As with saag paneer, there are many large soft cheese chunks, but there are also small pockets of semi-melted feta flowing through the gravy. And like everything else in this book, Saag Feta has an unbeatable ratio of effort / ROI: It’s all done in about half an hour, including preparation, and tastes so good it might just ruin the Saag Paneer for you. forever. I know this is for me.
One big change I made to the recipe from the book is to chop up the spices rather than tossing them whole in the sauce, as the recipe suggests. If you don’t have Vitamix (or similar), I recommend that you do the same; no amount of mashed potatoes with my blender could grind all the cardamom and coriander pod. Also, my tweaks are minor: more feta, more garlic, and more lime in the sauce, plus a pinch of Aleppo flakes ( soft fruity red pepper ) in the cheong for extra color and flavor. If you’ve never made a cheongkok before, it’s basically a mixture of whole and / or ground spices fried in butter or ghee, drizzled over a platter as a finishing touch.
Here’s how easy it is to make saag feta. Fold the diced feta into a quick super-tasty spinach sauce …
… make cheongk by roasting whole cumin seeds and ground red pepper in ghee …
… and sprinkle it all over. Serve with basmati rice, lime wedges, yoghurt and cilantro. That’s all.
The best part? This ingenious exchange goes far beyond the saag paneer. Whether you add it to a gravy or mix it with vegetables, diced feta has all the creamy qualities of paneer with the added effect of addictive saltiness. I don’t know about you, but I love matar feta, feta tikka masala and feta gobi and can’t wait to experiment.