Showing posts with label Indian chese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indian chese. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Visiting the North Indian cuisine from my kitchen

Annoyed about so much discussion and reading about Indian cuisine, but so little experience, I decided to start my own culinary tour of some local dishes. 

The first try was dilly style palak paneer, considered a popular vegetarian dish in North India, common to both Pakistani and Indian cuisine. Paneer is the tender Indian cheese, very sweet and a real pleasure for the palate. The small chunks of cheese are covered in a combination of fresh spinach leaves, butter, onion, tomatoes and a lot of aromatic spices that unfortunatelly I cannot name exactly. It is not considered very hot, but after two seconds you will feel a wave of hot temperature bursting from your mouth. You do not throw out flames; not yet. Most probably my big mistake is that I did not know that I may need some yogurt dressing or a simple boiled rice pr even better, a chunk of Indian bread for diminishing the hotness. 

Without moving from North India, I switched the next day to a different (still vegetarian) dish, also based on paneer - mutter (or mattar, according to some prononciations) paneer. It is less spicey that the palak one. It has: peas, tomatoes and a bunch of spices that I do not know too much about. Some recipes include a local type of potato, but I did not feel something was missing out of my dish. If you would love to taste it in a local restaurant, you may be offered some Indian bread on the side. 


Both dishes can be prepared at home, but I would prefer a basic training in portioning and calculating the right concentration of spices.