Super Soft Paneer Recipe at Home | Rich source of Protein and Calcium
Super soft Paneer or Cottage Cheese is easy to prepare and it is a must have food in most of the Indian homes.
Paneer is rich in calcium and a very good source of protein for vegetarians. Calcium helps to strengthen bones and teeths. If someone does not like to drink milk (in-fact those who run away from milk) - for those people, Paneer can be really helpful to fulfil our body's calcium need.
Some additional Info about preparing Paneer
Paneer is prepared by curdling milk. Making fresh super soft paneer at home is super easy, however, it is a little time consuming process. We just need only 2 ingredients to make super soft creamy paneer recipe at home. Full cream milk is very important ingredient to make nice melting paneer (do not use skimmed milk for making Paneer). To curdle the milk, either lemon or citric acid is used. I prefer to use fresh lemons instead of citrix acid for this recipe.
Cubes of Paneer or Paneer slices can be obtained by pressing the curdled milk chunks by putting some weight onto it to remove all water. The curdled milk chunks are also known as Chenna, before pressing them to make Paneer.
We can use this freshly made paneer in plenty of other recipes like dry vegetables or gravy based paneer recipes. You may try my super quick dry matar paneer recipe as well. Also, paneer can be used to prepare parathas, sandwiches, bread rolls, puffs or pulav.
This recipe gives you a super soft Paneer and it will break if we overcook it. So, it's important to add paneer at last to any recipe as it's already super soft and there is no need to cook it more. In a just few minutes, this paneer will become very soft when you are using it in your recipe.
In India, paneer is easily available in most of the grocery stores and it is quite good textured paneer (well, not all of those are good though). But when you stay out of India, it's quite difficult to get nice soft Paneer (I ate rubbery textured paneer before I started to make Paneer at home).
Follow these steps and you can also make creamy super soft Paneer at your home.
To check many more such tasty food recipes, you may also visit FoodQuench’s YouTube Channel.
- 1.5 liter Full Cream Milk
- 4 tablespoons Lemon Juice
Squeeze lemon, use a tea strainer when squeezing as we need lemon juice without pulp or seeds.
Removing lemon pulp is very important. If we add lemon juice with pulp to milk, when milk curdles lemon pulp stays inside and it can't be seperated from curdled milk. It is very important to remove pulp otherwise the paneer can get soury in taste if we skip this step.
Add milk to large vessel. Once milk is super hot, start adding lemon juice to it.
You will see that Milk starts to curdle.
Allow milk to boil and curdle completely.
Now milk and water have separated completely and formed small chunks of Paneer or cottage cheese.
Place muslin cloth on a strainer, and pour hot water and Paneer into the muslin cloth to separate out the paneer.
Now wash paneer with clean running tap water or use water in a bottle or jar to wash the Paneer (repeat this process for 3 to 4 times).
It is a must step and don't skip. This helps to remove all the lemon flavour and taste from paneer.Squeeze and remove all excess water by pressing muslin cloth.
Now tie muslin cloth tightly.
Place curdled paneer muslin cloth bag on some plain even surface or box. Keep some weight on top of it as shown in picture. Putting weight on it helps to remove all excess water from curdled paneer and binds all the chunks together.
When placing muslin cloth pouch/bag, make sure the knot is lying on the side and not on top, otherwise paneer won't get flatten.
After 4 hours, all the water has been removed and our homemade paneer is ready.
Refrigerate Paneer (cottage cheese) for 30 to 40 minutes before cutting it into pieces. It makes sure that paneer will not break while cutting.This homemade Paneer is so soft that it melts in mouth. Try this creamy textured soft homemade Paneer recipe once and you will always end up choosing Homemade Paneer instead of readymade ones.