Priya Makes Saag Feta | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

oh, sorry, I love the smell of ghee, the bad thing, I just received copy number one of my cookbook, Indian finish, do you want me to like it? It comes out April 23. This is the cover depicting my mom as Rosie the Riveter, but instead of we can do it, you can cook it, made by Maria Comer, my favorite illustrator, so yes, today we are going to prepare one of the dishes from this cookbook, spinach and

feta

cooked like grass, you may or may not have heard of

saag

paneer. a very standard takeout staple, it's basically a plate of paneer, which is the type of Indian cheese cooked in a spiced spinach sauce and pureed, but we're doing something a little different instead of using paneer, which you can totally use in In this recipe we are going to use

feta

cheese, salty and salty Greek cheese, it crumbles easily.

I could literally eat blocks of this stuff, so we were making a version with it and my mom discovered when we went to Greece that feta and spinach go together. They go together perfectly and the feta cheese does this wonderful job of adding this savory, savory element to an aromatic spinach dip. Nowadays there is a lot of groundnut and peanut gallery, it is a little more interesting than a standard

saag

paneer and is one of the most loved dishes. In our house, the first thing we're going to do is most Indian dishes start by chopping an onion, so we're just going to cut it into half inch dice and this is going to go into the blender, so don't get too obsessed with doing that. a perfect cut people always ask me if you remove the seeds from your chiles.

I never do it. I feel like this is a chili in the whole dish. You can handle it, trust me. We have chopped the onion. We have chopped the chili. Let's drink. everything on the stove and prepare our sauce, so we'll heat it over medium heat and add our key so you can use ghee or olive oil. I prefer the key because it has a really rich flavor. I also used butter, but it has a little bit higher burning point, so it's easier, so let's put in our ghee. We have a quarter cup here, so the ghee is basically clarified butter, all you need.

What you do to make ki is melt a stick of butter in a pan, wait for something white and foamy to appear on top and then strain it with a spoon or pass it through cheesecloth and you have the key, first. We're going to add our spices, we've got coriander seeds which are nice and earthy and then we've got our green cardamom pods and the best part about this is you don't have to grind them because you're going to end up blending this in the blender anyway so you can add whole spices. A cardinal rule in Indian cooking is that you should always toast your spices, this is how you really get the maximum aroma and flavor out of them if you are By not toasting your spices, you often get a more bitter, strange and earthy taste, but as soon as As you roast them, those natural oils are released and it will taste great.

There is nothing better than smelling melted key. in a pan, can you smell it from there? Then you see that the coriander seeds are browning a little. That's what you're looking for, that means they've been toasted. You're just looking for a medium brown shade. Now we're going to add our onion, so we're going to cook the onion now until it turns translucent. The key is to make sure they're covered with the key and then you spread them out in a layer like this and leave them. it'll be like the bottom burns a little bit and somehow you're getting the maximum of that onion flavor, you're getting the sweetness, you're getting the char Ness, that's how you build the complexity, so yeah, this is going for a few minutes, okay, the onions look good, we'll add our ginger and garlic, ginger, garlic and onion are essentially like the Holy Trinity of much of Indian cuisine, if you start with onion, ginger, garlic, you can put anything in there and it tastes great cook this for about a minute you're just looking for the ginger and garlic to be covered with the key once you start to smell it do you like a kind of ghee, garlic, ginger?

Now we will add our spinach, about a pound of spinach this seems like a lot but it will wilt. I try to add it in small bunches and then let it wilt. Add another bunch. Let it wither. He doesn't want it to be completely dead. He wants me to have some. green flavor, but you want it to soften because it will be easier to mix, so we'll let it cool. First I'm going to add our coarsely chopped chili, a little bit of lemon juice, you can add more or less depending on how sour things you like and then a teaspoon of salt and then before we put it in the blender we're going to let it cool for a while. bit, so here's my advice on feta cheese, which is what you want to buy.

If you buy it in block form like this, you don't want to buy it crumbled in those little packets you get at grocery stores. When you buy it in these big blocks, it dries out less easily, especially if you pack it in brine, which is kind of like the salty water that gives feta cheese, it has a wonderful flavor. I'm going to make cubes because it's more like Assad, it's more fun, so paneer is a type of Indian cheese. I guess it's similar if you just pressed ricotta. together in a firm block, it doesn't really have much flavor, but it has a lot of texture and absorbs sauces very well, so it works well in Indian cuisine, where there is a lot of vegetarian cuisine and you want something. that will really absorb the flavors of all those spices.

What I would say is that I like saag paneer but I love SOG feta. Something I really like and dread is transferring things from a frying pan to a blender. Is there anything worse? There is something? like a trick I'm missing about transferring from the pan to the blender, that's how it is just with a cup measure, let's try it because I'm usually literally like it's a very awkward move, I'm awkward, let's try it, aha, oh God. Gosh, okay, let's try it, let's see, oh yeah, top tips from Rhoda Bean Food, okay, so when you mix up the spinach, you're not looking for baby food, you want something that's kind of homogeneous but still has some kind of spinach specks like you.

I don't want to try it and it just tastes exactly what you want to know, like a few bits of spinach, so we're going to blend it, but not too much, so this is the consistency you're looking for, see how that goes. I have some little specks of spinach, that's okay. I'm just going to try this, it's really good. One thing to keep in mind is that when you taste this for salt, you will add feta cheese later and that feta cheese will salt the dish. You don't want this to be too salty because you're adding another salty component that isn't very good.

Now we're going to go to the stove, add our spinach sauce, water and feta cheese and then we'll finish everything up. with a little chunk there let's simmer one of my mom's tricks to get out of the blender is to put a little bit of water, stir it and then add it back, so I'm going to do that and then I'm going to add more water for this , you're basically looking for something that's a mixable sauce, something that you like, swirl your spoon beautifully, so now what we're going to do is add the feta cheese, be very gentle, I just want the sauce to coat the feta cheese really well. and beautifully without breaking up the feta.

I'm going to let it simmer for a couple of minutes, basically what you're looking for is like baked feta. into the sauce a little bit, but not completely melted, that's how the feta cheese will absorb all those amazing, complex flavors from the sauce and make something that is extremely delicious and in the meantime, maybe we can make our chok chok time to bite people. Ask if this recipe, for example, why does it add the key and then the spices twice like you do at the beginning and then do the ending? Why can't I combine all of this in one step and the question is, are you looking for something like this? layer flavors like we had our spinach dip infused with that wonderful cilantro and cardamom and with the kind of herbaceous nests of the spinach and now we're going to combine it with this kind of nutty richness of the ghee, the earthiness of the cumin seeds . the spiciness of the red chili powder and then of course our asafoetida, which I don't think we've used in Test Kitchen, but it's kind of I'd like to think it's like Indian MSG, kind of mystical. powder that

makes

Indian food taste more Indian if you ever eat an Indian dish and think what is something like lip smacking like an appetizing flavor most of the time it is heme so you will heat this on medium high heat So you're really working, remember you're working very fast when you're making a chunk like this, it happens very quickly and if you get distracted you'll burn the spices, so work quickly and carefully to add our depth as soon as it melts. and it turns transparent, we'll add our cumin seeds as soon as you start to see the cumin seeds dancing like this as soon as they're making a little jiggle in the pan, which is usually when they're done.

I'm going to let them dance a little bit more, they're like this and you want them to be like this when they're done and then we'll immediately add cayenne paprika and any red chili powder you have. any works and then a little bit of heat a little bit of heat goes a long way don't treat this like any other spice and then as soon as it's ready you pour it over the top so you can feel like this is what I love about it. This dish is I love the way the pieces shimmer and form pockets of fat in a spinach sauce, so let's take it out carefully.

Wow, it smells very good. I think I'm going to eat it. with rice and roti, if that's okay, I think the pro move here is to fill a bowl with some rice and then put some SOG feta on top, eat all that, then use the roti to cover up the leftovers and clean your bowls so let's assemble them some rice how much rice is too much rice I don't know if there is such a thing oh I feel so bad to pierce this beautiful thing like choco fide Chaka v can you make chalk in an adverb a verb can be anyone can be anything you want to be holy cannoli I almost said a bad word but I didn't know ma'am there is the supreme difference that feta cheese

makes

as well as the way it just melts in your mouth you don't get that with paneer , paneer is amazing, don't get me wrong, but feta cheese is kind of like, it literally melts in your mouth like feta cheese, just like feta cheese, it melts on your tongue with this salty, funky flavor and then on top of that you have a really really good spinach dip if you somehow mess up your spinach dip you're like throwing the piece on top so on top you have a greasy ki mixture with nuts and I mean. they're like layers of things that say: how could you go wrong?

You know you won't find feta cheese prepared like saag paneer in India. It's one of those distinctly Indian-American dishes, but I think that's what makes it so wonderful, because you know immigrants are coming. In this country they cannot find all the ingredients they are looking for, they find substitutes and new and beautiful discoveries are made. I cook like saag paneer, that's exactly what it is. It might be sacrilege to put feta cheese in saag paneer, but what is it? If loving feta cooked like saag paneer is wrong, I don't want to be right