Name: Paneer Makhani
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 2 h
Total time: 2 h 10 min
Cuisine: Indian
Ingredients: 4 ripe tomatoes (approximately 400 gms); 400 ml water; 2 large garlic pods; 1 green Chili small, desseded and the white ribs inside removed; 0.5 tsp kashmiri red chili powder (use paprika if not available but avoid a hot chili powder); 4 cloves; 4 cardamom pods; 6 cashews; 2 Tbsp Butter; 2 Tbsp heavy whipping Cream; Some butter to pan saute; 1 tsp Kasuri Methi; 0.5 tsp thin ginger Julienne’s; salt to taste; 8 small pieces of paneer

What is Makhani

There is the Indian home cooking and there is the restaurant cooking. Some of the very popular dishes in Indian restaurant cuisine are based on the Makhani sauce. It is essentially a tomato, butter and cream sauce which is then combined with other ingredients like paneer or chicken. It is the slightly orange colored sauce you will find in restaurants. The Makhani / Makhni word is similar to the word “Makhan” which means butter. But am also told that Makhni means silken which also makes quite a lot of sense in this case. Indeed, i can describe the texture of this sauce as that of a tomato and cream based silken veloute.

You can also start with the Makhani sauce and with addition of more heat or spices and protein you can make other dishes like Paneer Masala or Butter Chicken or Chicken Tikka Masala. Also since this recipe is prevalent and popular for only half a century or so, there is not a single recipe that stands true. The names are used interchangeably. Depending on the restaurant one might find the Paneer Makhani and Paneer butter masala are more or less the same.

Our Minimalist Paneer Makhani

Not surprisingly, there are lot of Makhani recipes online. A lot of them are very complex and use lot of ingredients. However the Makhani sauce is more about some basic techniques and ingredients and should be quite simple to make.We endeavored to make the minimal Makhani working consciously towards the Makhani sauce that we enjoy.

Instead of asking what could we add? We asked the question “what could we remove from the recipe?”

As a new cook of Makhani, you may try lot of recipes and miss the exact flavors. In such a case it is instinctive to add more spices or ingredients. This especially happens first few times you cook Makhani. We urge you that with this recipe you try this a couple of times and then slowly customize the heat and spice level towards the end and with your following attempts while keeping the techniques described here.

The Flavors

Makhani is a balance of sour sweet bitter savory hot and pungent flavors. Yes i did say sweet. With lot of Indians there is a implicit trend that food should be hotter and the mention of word sweet raises objections. There is maybe a good reason for that too. To balance the sour or acidic flavors from tomato lot of restaurants add sugar or honey, sometimes so much that the sauce does taste overly sugary of the processed kind. Instead by sweet here we mean the natural sweet flavors coaxed from the tomatoes, the cream and the butter. A part of the sweetness comes also from the aromatics of cloves.

In the end it is a question of balancing all the above flavors and obtain the correct silken creamy texture. When done right it does work like a symphony, the sweetness and the fat toning down the acidity from tomatoes and the bitter tones of kasuri methi cutting down the richness that comes from all the fat.

The Importance of Fresh Tomatoes

The name of the game for this sauce is to balance the acidity of tomatoes. This is done by coaxing the sugars out of tomatoes by reducing them and letting the sauce pan caramelize a bit when finishing. But rest is done using the sweetness and richness of the butter, the cream and the cashews. Now more acidic the tomatoes, more the required cream, butter and cashews i.e more fat will be needed to balance it. And inadvertently more bitter flavors and heat will be needed to cut the richness.

Many friends have observed over the years that Indian food at restaurants keeps getting richer and richer. I remember having the same dishes a couple of decades back and they used to somehow feel a bit lighter. Part of the reason is now at restaurants and even at home lot of people make use of canned tomatoes or ready made purees. Because they need to be preserved, inadvertently these products are more acidic through addition of preservatives like vinegar’s or acids of the preservatives kind. Naturally to balance this acidity lot of other ingredients we mentioned need to be used. Sometime people also add baking soda which is alkaline to cut down the acidity of these purees.

Acidity is measured using the pH Scale. Lower the number, more acidic or sour tasting the food will be. As you can see Canned tomatoes are much more acidic. Supermarket tomatoes are slightly less acidic, but ripe tomatoes are the lowest in acidity. We urge you to make use of ripe tomatoes and the rest of the job will be simpler.

Our other tip for tomatoes is that tomatoes are picked quite early to make them last and appear bright red and firm at supermarkets. But remember even at supermarkets tomatoes are not in the refrigerator section. So when you bring them home, don’t stick them in the refrigerator. Let them sit on your counter a bit and ripen. They will reward you with some delicious sweetness. Better yet buy them at the farmers market, ripe and ready in the summer.

The Base

The recipe is quite simple. It does not involve lot of prep and chopping. Rough chop the tomatoes, de-seed the green chilies and add cardamom, cloves, garlic and red chili powder, cashews and water. Set this on low to medium heat (4/10) in a saucepan and walk away. Let this cook for one to one and a half hours.

Here lot of recipes might ask you to add ginger garlic past or ginger as well. We do not recommend you do that since the ginger almost brings even more sharp acidity in play and in fact the resulting sauce gets a cutting sharpness since it steeps just like it does when making adrak (ginger) chai. what is great for the chai is not so good for the sauce. It will be the first thing you will taste in resulting sauce if you add it here and will not let the other subtle flavors to shine.

This would gently cook away almost melting the tomatoes to start making something like a pulpy sauce.

Then puree this with an immersion blender.

The importance of Straining

The next step is to strain your puree. This is what will give your sauce the luxurious silken veloute like texture. A trick is to scrape the mix around with spatula or shaking the strainer or even tapping the strainer to accelerate the straining. Tapping makes the liquid fall quickly.

You will end up with all the seeds etc and be left with gorgeously orange puree.

The importance of Reducing

You will end up with approximately 500 ml of puree. Its important to put it back on the stove in a clean sauce pan and again on low heat (3/10) reduce it to almost 60% of what you began with.

Once it is reduced you add the cream and butter and reduce it further to end up with about 400 ml of mixture. This is now almost done and the last step is to coax out some sweetness by doing a last caramelizing reduction in a large high heat saute pan. In usa the cream available is not as thick as the cream in India. The cream in India has a much higher fat content. Hence many recipes will ask you to just fold in the cream at the end. However in USA it is okay if you add the heavy whipping cream and reduce the stock on low heat and it even withstands the pan sauteing we will do later. A tip is that if you don’t have cream, its fine, just add milk. We make up a little bit with time, by spending a little bit more time to reduce the sauce down. As long as you do that and your acidity is balanced, things work out well with the sauce. Another option is to add a couple of cashews and use milk instead of cream.

The importance of Roasting Kasuri Methi

As we mentioned that we cut down the richness with some bitter notes from the kasuri methi. These are the dried leaves of fenugreek. There are two reasons to roast. The dried leaves come with stalks and stems which are texturaly not pleasant on the palate. Roasting them makes them a bit crispier and allows you to powder them fine. The other major reason is the transformation. The methi transforms into an addictively aromatic persona after you roast it in a pan.

For this sauce we roast it till aromatic and crispy and then grind it to a fine powder.

This is the last thing you add to your dish. The transformation this will bring is monumental. We urge to taste your sauce before and after adding this to give you and idea of how the bitter nuttiness elevates the dish to a relishing affair.

The importance of finishing in Pan

One of the most important steps is to finish the sauce in a large saute pan. Large pan allows to retain the heat even as lot of sauce hits the pan. It important to cook this sauce quickly, caramelizing it while moving it around as it bubble sand also reduces. The difference between an okay makhani dish and a complex and texturaly binding dish is this pan sauteing. Start the pan off with some butter and then ladle the sauce one ladle at a time. Doing it this way also allows you to use the limited heat of home kitchen stoves to your advantage. So add a ladle, shake the pan and stir the sauce around moving quickly and when reduced a bit add next ladle and reduce. You are creating the delicious flavors layer by layer.

We forgot to take a picture of this step but our friends recreated the recipe in their kitchen and obliged us with a picture and permission to use it on our blog.

Above Picture: Courtesy of Gregor’s Kitchen

Only when you are finished reduce the pan to low heat and add the kasuri methi powder. Then add the paneer now turning off the heat and gently cooking the paneer in the residual heat so as to not overcook and make it chewy. Finish with thinly cut ginger julienne s. Adding ginger like this allows to get some sharpness of ginger every now and then refreshing your palate for the next few bites. Serve with tandoori naan or roti.

Paneer Makhani

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Author: www.breakingnaan.com
Total Time: 2 hours 10 mins
Yield: Serves 2

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Description

Paneer Makhani or sometimes known as Paneer butter masala is the quintessential tomato, butter and cream sauce. Our recipe tries to give a minimalist version and recommends to use fresh tomatoes.

Ingredients

Scale

4 ripe tomatoes (approximately 400 gms)
400 ml water
2 large garlic pods
1 green Chili small, desseded and the white ribs inside removed
0.5 tsp kashmiri red chili powder (use paprika if not available but avoid a hot chili powder)
4 cloves
4 cardamom pods
6 cashews
2 Tbsp Butter
2 Tbsp heavy whipping Cream
Some butter to pan saute
1 tsp Kasuri Methi
0.5 tsp thin ginger Julienne’s
salt to taste
8 small pieces of paneer

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Instructions

Wash and rough chop tomatoes
Wash and split and deseed green chili
Peel Garlic
Add the 400 ml water, tomatoes, garlic, cloves, cardamoms, cashews, red chili powder to a sauce pan and set on low to medium heat (4/10 on a home cooking range)
Cook uncovered for 60 to 90 minutes till the tomatoes start melting and creating a pulpy sauce
Puree fine in an immersion blender
Strain the mixture to obtain about 500 ml of puree
Reduce again in a clean stock pot on low heat (30%) to about 60%. If the mixture gets very bubbly gently half close the pot with a lid to avoid spatter
Mix in the butter and cream and reduce further till you end up with sauce like consistency
Roast the methi leaves in a dry roasting pan without burning till the smell aromatic
Grind them to a fine powder
Set a large saute pan and melt some butter and once melted increase heat to high.
Add the sauce one ladle at a time working quickly and shaking the saute pan and moving the sauce around with a wooden spoon
Careful that if the sauce still has lot of water it may splatter so move quickly or just lift the pan off the heat
Once first ladle is reduced add next ladle and reduce again. If it works you can add more than a ladle at a time, but key is to pan saute and caramelize the sauce a bit to bring out the sweetness
Season with salt and taste and then finish by sprinkling the kasuri methi powder little at a time, mixing and tasting to balance the richness.
Take the pan off the heat and add paneer and fold in gently letting the paneer cook on the residual heat. Only if needed set the pan on low heat to cook paneer.
Serve and garnish with ginger julienne s and serve with roti or naan

Prep Time: 10 mins
Cook Time: 120 mins
Category: Entree
Cuisine: Indian

We are blessed with some great friends in Germany. They not only tried out the recipe but also helped create a translation for German readers. Really blessed to have such friends with enthusiasm and passion for cooking and indian food and thankful to Doris P. who took the time and effort to provide a german translation.

Paneer Makhani (German)