nocturne@slrpnk.netI realize this is technically cooking, but there is so much more to making cheese than just cooking.
Paneer is the easiest cheese to make, even when it goes wrong it is fixable. What do you need to make paneer? Milk (cannot be ultra high temp pastured), acid, a vessel to heat the milk, and a cloth to strain the acidified milk.
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Add your milk to your heating vessel. I use a gallon of whole milk. Put the vessel over a medium-ish heat. I I have a very heavy bottomed pot I use, and then I have a great disperser between the flame and the bottom of the pot.
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Heat the milk to about boiling, keep an eye on it. Unlike water milk goes from not boiling to boiling all over the stove top in 1/2 a second.
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Once your milk is boiling lower your heat as low as you can, add in 1/4 c acid (I have used powdered citric acid diluted in water, or lemon juice, my sister’s and dad are allergic to citrus so I switched to white vinegar). Slowly you should see the milk begin to coagulate and separate from the whey. If after 5 minutes or so the liquid is still white, add another 1/4c of acid. Continue this until you have a yellow liquid (whey) and white solids (to be cheese).
- Now you need to remove the cheese from the whey. When I first started making this 14 years ago I had no special equipment. So I lined a colander with my thinnest towel and used a ladle to spoon everything into the strainer. Now I have a cheese mold that I line with a small bit of cloth, the mold sits inside a colander lined with cheese cloth. But if you do not have a mold, that is fine!
My Cheese Mold:
Cheese mold with the cloth inside it, sitting inside the lined colander:
- Begin to ladle, scoop, pour, or whatever to get the cheese into the cloth. I have a couple different tools I use. Once you have all your liquid and cheese through the cloth you can squeeze out the remaining whey… BE CAREFUL IT IS STILL HOT you will burn yourself if you are not careful. Before I had my cheese mold I took the towel with the cheese and twisted the top to squeeze out as much whey as I could, then hung it from a cabinet to let it drain more.
My ladle and a spider (not actually sure if this is a spider technically, or just a large flat slotted spoon.
- Once you have squeezed the whey from your curd you have ricotta. If you would like you can stop here, sprinkle some salt on IT and make lasagna. Otherwise we need to press the curds into our paneer. In the beginning I took the towel full of curds and stuck the between two plates. Then I put the pot full of whey on the top plate. Every 20 minutes or so I poured off excess whey and flipped my cheese. Now it goes into the mold.
- Apply weight to your curds. Be it between two plates, between two cutting boards (this is way better to do than two plates, I broke a plate once and ruined the plate and then w batch of cheese), or in a mold. I start with an 8-12lbs weight. I place it on the mold insert (the insert is called a chaser) then as the whey is pressed out adjust the weight so the chaser is level.
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Flip your block. After a bit, maybe every 10-20 minutes I flip the cheese block. A lot of times I make cheese while sound something else, so 20 minutes becomes 40 minutes, or 2 hours. It is best to do your flips often at the start because the curds are hot and shape much better.
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Once I flip it a few Times and it is looking really rectangular I remove the cloth and add a second weight. For this batch I totaled 22lbs.
Still in the cloth:
Cloth removed: Image
After 2 hours at 22lbs:
From 1 gallon of milk I ended with 583g of cheese.
lvxferre@mander.xyz
I’m quite fond of Paneer Masala, but I had no idea paneer was so easy to make. Thanks for the write-up Nocturne! :D
If you have ever bought paneer, you will find this is about half the price, and twice as good! I made this while I was cooking dinner.
Spectacular, thank you- and also with the use for the whey in bread making!