I don't know about a lot of you, but I frequently have old-ish milk sitting in the fridge. My wife and I generally don't drink milk, so I buy it for cooking and coffee. That means whole milk. So I use some, but rarely do I finish the gallon before it goes bad. Well, it seems like such a waste. I hate wasting food. What can I do with this milk? One obvious solution is to make paneer. What is paneer? I
think there are a lot of people out there who are fans of Indian food who are familiar with the popular dishes Palak Paneer and Saag Paneer
(saag means spinach in Hindi and paneer are cheese curds (think Miss
Muffitt)). Well, paneer is technically super easy to make at home with milk. You just heat some milk to boiling, then add some vinegar to curdle the milk, filter the curds out, then compress them to get all the liquid out. Easy, right? Well, the kicker is the heating the milk to boiling part. As many readers out there may have experienced, milk has a nasty tendency to burn if it isn't stirred constantly while heating. If it does, your paneer tastes like charcoal brickets when you are finished - gross. Plus, it takes forever to heat a gallon of milk to boiling, so you end up with huddled over the stove for an hour stirring constantly to prevent scorching and watching for the pot to boil, which you begin to think NEVER will happen. Altogether, time consuming and easy to screw up. An an industrial chemist, this raises red flags as a bad process.
So I've been reading my Cook's Illustrated "The Science of Good Cooking" and it gets me thinking about how to do things better. They love to pop stuff in the microwave. It's quick and pretty forgiving. The worst you can do in a microwave is over heat something. Not a bit deal. So, while hiking today, the solution came to me. Instead of heating the milk on the stove, why not just do it in the microwave? Scorching risk gone and the time is cut by 80% at least. Below is my quick, easy paneer prep procedure. I've read many paneer preparation procedures, but I only found one cruddy one that mentions using the microwave, so I appear to be a pioneer
Easy Paneer
1) Heat 1/2-1 gallon of whole milk in the microwave to boiling on high. This will take about 10-20 minutes.
2) Add white vinegar or lemon juice and stir. Keep adding acid until the white curds begins to form chunks and settle out, leaving a thin greenish liquid
3) Pour the curds into a cheesecloth lined strainer. Drain off the whey.
4) Rinse with water until the vinegar smell is gone
5) Fold in the sides of the cheesecloth to cover the cheese.
6) Put a big weight on the paneer until all the liquid is squeezed out. I will typically put the cheese on a plate, put another plate on top, then put a gallon jug on the top plate and drain off the liquid periodically.
The paneer is a little more crumbly that the store bought variety, but is also firmer. You can supplement the milk with half and half or cream. This will increase the yield. Paneer keeps indefinitely in the freezer. It stir fries great without melting and is a good source of protein to any veggie dish.
Ok, so here is the finished product. What I did was add it to a small piece of tupperware, put the lid for a smaller piece of tupperware on top of it, put a coffee cup on top of this, then a plate, and finally a gallon of water. There might be a better way to do this, but it allowed me to put a large amount of weigh directly on top of the paneer and press it into a mold.
So it is a little crumbly, but pretty well compressed. Into the freezer it goes. From a half gallon of milk, I get around a half pound of paneer.
