63. Paneer

I stood at my stove in my own kitchen and made paneer, an Indian farmers cheese. I got help on the internet. Here's what I did:

I put a half gallon of whole milk on to boil. I let it come to a boil while I took these pictures and marveled at how I think the kitchen is clean enough but the camera always catches me in denial.

It boiled and I added a 1/4 cup of lemon juice diluted in a 1/2 cup of warm water.

I stirred.
It separated, which was actually kind of gross, like what you don't want milk to do, there I'd done it on purpose.

I poured it into a cloth napkin I'd draped over a colander. I didn't have cheesecloth and it was too late to run upstairs for muslin. I just used a clean cloth napkin.
I rinsed the little globs of cheese to get rid of the lemon taste.

Then I put the globs into a glass container until I needed it for saag paneer. I could have pressed it further and made it more of a solid, like a tofu consistency, but I was sort of pressed, myself, for time. So it was more of a ricotta-esque, only dryer, kind of cheese.

Which made me realize something, that I no longer had to hope for the best and no antibiotics/hormones in my domestic ricotta--which of course is too much to hope for. I buy antibiotic and hormone free dairy products and meat--you would too if you'd had an antibiotic-resistant infection during childbirth. But the only product I could never find that way was ricotta. So every time I made lasagna I felt a bit queasy. Paneer is not equivalent to ricotta. But it could substitute. Easily.

I also started reading up on how to make my own ricotta, for that matter. Perhaps stay tuned.

I love the feeling of learning something new and being empowered by that learning.