Though ”Paneer Platter” is English, it is here a reference to the South Indian tradition of serving a larger plate (a so-called “thali”) with various smaller dishes. The South Indian kitchen is generally much simpler than the one(s) in Northern India, and it’s therefore customary to serve a larger platter with plenty of simple dishes. Bindia’s Paneer Platter is inspired by this South Indian custom.
In Northern India where Bindia’s founder Amer Suleman is from, it is inversely commonplace to invite your guests for something more like a buffet, where all the food is placed in the middle of the table with everyone sitting around it, taking whatever, they want to. ”This is a luxury and a tradition, which surprises a few Westerners”, Amer Suleman admits. Bindia’s Paneer Platter is therefore a way to collect a few different things on one plate to make it more simple, cheap, and easier to understand for the Western guest.
On our Paneer Platter we serve our famous Butter curry with a fresh Indian cheese and aromatic basmati rice.
During its creation, our Butter curry goes through four different temperings, which is an Indian cooking technique of manipulating taste by adding crushed, stir-fried spices. We even use a lot of spices you won’t find in a Butter curry elsewhere.
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.
While “Butter” refers to the famous curry, “Paneer” is the name of a popular fresh acid-set cheese created from cow or buffalo milk, which constitutes the main ingredient on our Paneer Platter. 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.
Enjoy!
Try our Paneer Platter at your local Bindia in Østerbro, Nørrebro, Frederiksberg, Amager, Lyngby, and Søborg, or simply order it here.