Bindia’s Butter Paneer is a critically acclaimed curry with a popular fresh cheese.
Butter Paneer is a vegetarian dish from Northern India. The main ingredient is, as the name indicates, the famous Butter curry or Makhani, which is probably more famous in the West than its country of origin by now.
At Bindia, we make the Makahni as they do in the mountainous regions like Kashmir and Punjab where Amer Suleman is born and raised.
Here, you typically eat much milder food than in Southern India. Furthermore, nuts, instead of animal fat, are often central to the cooking process by providing lots of healthy and nutritional calories, which are so essential in these colder regions.
We, therefore, have a special focus on the nuts – especially cashew – in our Butter Paneer.
As with our Korma curry, we have developed just the right mix of nuts and seeds for our Butter Paneer, which doesn’t just provide the dish with healthy calories, but simultaneously produces an exquisite and creamy texture. Together with the sourish tomatoes and the honey, the nut mix furthermore gives our Butter Paneer its particular sweetness with its subtle nutty nuances.
In fact, at several stages of the cooking process, you’ll find other secrets contributing to the success of our Butter Paneer, like for instance in the sophisticated and attentive approach to the heating of Suleman’s Butter curry.
At just the right temperature, a chemical reaction takes place between the fat and the tomatoes, which makes the taste come together in just the right way. If you never reach this temperature, you’ll never reach the same richness of taste, while you risk completely ruining the dish, if the temperature exceeds this magical sweet spot, Bindia’s head chef warns.
Besides the right temperature, Bindia’s Butter Paneer must be seasoned and flavored with not only the right spices, but also by the correct methods, which happens through a process called tempering - a specific spicing method common in India and its neighboring countries of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
During tempering, grinded spices are stir-fried in burning hot ghee (or oils suitable for such heat). When the crushed spices hit the boiling warm fat, they have a heat shock response, which makes them discharge their essential oils and, thereby, rich flavor.
During its creation, our Butter Paneer goes through four different phases of tempering. And we even use lots of spices you won’t find in a Butter Paneer elsewhere.
While “Butter” refers to the curry, “Paneer” is the name of a popular fresh acid-set cheese created from cow or buffalo milk, which constitutes the main ingredient in Butter Paneer. Paneer is no longer just popular in its home country but has gradually gained quite some traction in the West as well. Being low in fat and high in protein, this fresh and filling cheese has increasingly become a sought-after source of protein in many meat-free dishes.
As Paneer has a mild taste and open structure, it easily absorbs the taste from the food and spices that it is cooked together with – like the sourish tomatoes, the sweet honey, and the nutty Butter curry.
We use a total of 23 different ingredients in this customer favorite: all the way from the base of the curry consisting of just tomatoes, ginger, and garlic, to the more surprising contents like poppy seeds and licorice root.
Enjoy!
Try our Butter Paneer at your local Bindia in Østerbro, Nørrebro, Frederiksberg, Amager, Lyngby, and Søborg, or simply order it here.