Saag Paneer, and a Reality Check

The other night I made saag paneer and invited a friend over for dinner.

Rob and I haven’t seen each other in a few years. He’s the childhood friend of my best guy buddy Paul, who introduced the two of us one 4th of July when Paul and I were both home from Japan on vacation. That evening we sat on a hillside and watched fireworks and drank beers and I heard an entire language of shared childhood memories that these two boys carry with them. Ever since that night I’ve had a soft spot for Rob. I don’t see him often—the last time was a good four years ago—but once I got settled in Seattle I gave him a call and invited him over for dinner.

Then I made Indian food.

I’m not some pro at whipping up Indian food. I’m usually content to eat it in restaurants, thinking it must be extremely labor intensive. But last fall I made a batch of chana masala from Brandon’s recipe that Molly posted on Orangette. The flavors were so much bolder than what you get in restaurants that it took me by surprise. It’s also true that there’s a lot of not great Indian food in restaurants—overly oily, overly mushy—and I wasn't sure where to go for good Indian in Seattle. I decided to see how I might fare on my own.

Indian food isn’t excessively labor intensive, at least not the dishes I picked, but it is spice intensive—a good excuse to stock my new kitchen with lovely things like cardamom pods, garam masala, tumeric, and ground corriander. There was a fair amount of prep work, mostly three bundles of fresh bunched spinach that needed to be destemmed. There was also the added adrenaline rush of not knowing if the recipes would turn out well. By the time Rob was on my doorstep, I was hours deep into the cooking process.



Rob came in and we caught up a bit before sitting down to eat. I carried the food to the table—Brandon’s superior chana masala, a smoky roasted baingan bharta made from a recent recipe in Saveur magazine, and a green and creamy saag paneer. There were plates of rice cooked with onion and cumin, and a cool yogurt raita to go alongside. We sat down and dug in.

Rob fell silent, eating steadily but saying nothing.

I sat there quietly for a moment, feeling awkward. The food was good, I could taste that, but I wasn’t sure about the silence. It felt weird, uncomfortable. Had something gone amiss?

Then it dawned on me—Rob’s not a foodie.

Any of my foodie friends would be peppering me with questions at this point. They’d want to know if I had roasted the eggplant in the oven or on the burner; had I used green cardamom or black; had I been to the great spice store in the market where they grind their own curry powders? They’d be teasing apart flavors and guessing at ingredients. They’d be comparing this Indian food to every other Indian meal they had ever eaten—and asking I had ever tasted the saag paneer from a certain restaurant, because they do a really good version and I should try it sometime.

In other words, we’d be dissecting our dinner as we ate it.

Not Rob. He contentedly ate his way through dinner, not feeling a need to comment, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise probe into our meal. And at the end, when we’d finished eating, he said, “Thanks, that was good.” Then we spent the rest of the evening talking about music, rock climbing, family, and the pros and cons of running your own business.

Wow, a non-foodie friend—I had almost forgotten what that’s like.



SAAG PANEER (PALAK PANEER)
Serves four as part of a larger meal.

I love saag paneer, that creamy spinach dish studded with cubes of mild paneer cheese. I order it whenever I am in an Indian restaurant, one of two dishes that I use as a benchmark to see how good I think the restaurant is. I’ve never wanted to know how it’s made—I know that spinach doesn’t get creamy on it’s own and I feared that the amount of fat involved would make me wince.

After some research I found that there are two ways to make your saag paneer creamy—ghee, which is a clarified butter used often in Indian cooking, or cream. I suspect that most restaurant versions use ghee, but I opted to try a cream version this time. Mostly because I was curious, but also because cream seems slightly healthier than butter, though I have no scientific basis for this notion.

I also wanted to make a high quality saag paneer—which, at it’s worst, can resemble baby food with all the spinach mushed together and no variations of flavor from one bite to another. I wanted texture, some interplay of spices, spinach that still looked like the leafy vegetable it had once been. I’m no expert on Indian food, but I looked at a number of recipes, took bits and pieces from those I liked, and hoped for the best.

And the result? It was good—very good, in fact. The chopped onion and tomato gave some texture, the spinach wasn’t cooked down into mush, and the spices made themselves known, mingling and dancing together. The result was a far better dish than I think you find in most restaurants—no baby food mush here. The cream-style was a little different than I’m used to, but it really is delicious (I’ve since made it with half-and-half with no problem). It melds with the spices into a soupy sauce that is fragrant with spices and savory. I will say that taking the spinach leaves off their stems is time consuming and slightly tedious, but it is worth the work in the end. Rob may not have noticed or mentioned it, but this was an excellent saag paneer.

3 large bunches of fresh spinach, washed and destemmed (this part is important)
1 large onion, chopped into a medium dice
1 medium tomato, chopped into a small dice
2 teaspoons tomato paste
1 cup heavy cream (can use half-and-half)
1 1/2 cup paneer cheese (fried in peanut oil, if you would like)
1 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
1 teaspoon fresh chopped or pressed garlic
1 1/2 tbs vegetable oil
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
3 green cardamom pods, smashed
1 stick cinnamon
3 cloves (I like to crush the soft, rounded head of the clove with a fingernail)
3 small bay leaves
2 tsp salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
Can add dried red pepper or a fresh hot green pepper for spice, if you like
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 cup fresh cilantro leaves, chopped

Sauté the chopped onion in oil until soft and golden. Add cumin seeds, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves, garlic and ginger, and chopped tomato. Sauté mixture for about a minute. Begin to add spinach, turning to allow it to cook down. When all spinach has been added and the mixture has turned a dark green, begin to add the remaining dry spices, salt and pepper. Mix well and continue to cook about 3 minutes. [If you would like to fry the paneer, you can do it now, cooking in a small amount of peanut oil to get a brown crust.] Add the cream and tomato paste, continuing to simmer the mixture another 5 minutes. Add paneer and fresh cilantro at the very end. Serve with rice or naan bread.

Is it even possible to take a picture of something like saag paneer and make it look aesthetically appealing? I'm not sure it is. This is not pretty food, folks, but it is yummy.