Milk (21 page)

H
ere is a bit of lagniappe for anyone with a batch of the above Ají de Leche and the leftover seasonings used to make the heady milk infusion. You can use it as anything from a dip to a noodle sauce. It also makes a great dressing for cold chicken or potatoes, and can profitably be substituted for tahini in pita sandwiches.

The exact proportions don’t matter. It can be thickish or thinnish, tame or blazing hot. You will find that peanuts vary in their ability to absorb water and oil.

YIELD:
About 2½ cups

Put the peanuts in a food processor and grind briefly, stopping before they start to form peanut butter. Add ¼ cup each of Ají de Leche and oil. Process the mixture to a coarse paste; if it’s too heavy for the blades, add more milk sauce and oil a little at a time until the texture is slightly thinner than peanut butter. Add ½ teaspoon salt and 1 tablespoon of the puréed aromatic mixture; taste for seasoning and work in as much more of each as you like.

The sauce will keep in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for about a week.

T
his is the sauce of sauces for any meat browned in a skillet or roasting pan. It’s like a tiny flavor blossom in the mouth and is meant to be dished out by the spoonful, not the cupful.

Cream-enriched pan gravy is another of those pleasures that almost defy recipes. But here is the simplest possible outline of the process as applied to any basic pan-broiled meat. You might choose loin lamb chops for an example—or steaks or hamburgers or “lamburgers.”

I will assume that you already know how to pan-cook the meat in a heavy skillet—NOT nonstick—so as to brown it well on all sides without extreme
charring. Remove the finished meat to a warmed platter. If a lot of fat has rendered out of the meat, simply pour it off. Immediately splash a little water into the hot pan. Forget exact measurements. Every case is different. Anything close to half a cup for a medium-sized skillet or a little more for a large one will do. You can use wine (any kind you like) or stock (ditto) instead of water, but the principle is the same. Turn up the heat to medium-high. With a wooden spoon or spatula, start “deglazing”—that is, scraping up all the browned bits from the pan so that they can melt back into the liquid. Try to be thorough, but fast. Turn down the heat a little if it’s bubbling away too fast to keep up with, but not so much as to discourage the liquid from reducing by more than half and forming a rich brown glaze.

Now add about as much heavy cream as the amount of water you started with. Stirring rapidly, let it reduce in the same way, but stop while it is still pourable. Pour the sauce over the meat and serve at once.

What you have just done is to superimpose a reduction on a reduction—slightly concentrated cream amalgamated with a concentrated solution made from everything that initially caramelized and sizzled as the meat juices met the heat of the pan. The same technique, on a larger scale, can be applied to the pan glazes or drippings of any meat or poultry—even a Thanksgiving turkey, if you share my opinion that a smidgin of this precious substance is better than a bucketful of anything else.

A
s I’ve explained, milk coagulated through the addition of acid at a high temperature isn’t really cheese. But it is the only cheeselike food that took root on the Indian subcontinent, or at least parts of it. (The taboo against “breaking” milk into curd and whey—see
this page
—prevented its acceptance everywhere.) And it has been greeted with great enthusiasm in the United States. I have even found frozen supermarket versions in New Jersey.

If you tried your hand at “White Magic”
Exercise 4
, you’ve already seen
acid coagulation at work. Larger batches involve just the same principle: Bring milk to a boil and while it is still hot, add some acid ingredient that makes it at once break into a mass of fluffy
curds floating in whey. Once the major part of the whey is drained, you hang up the curd in a cloth to drain or press it under a weight. Chhenna is what you get if you stop at a fairly soft, moist stage and leave the curd in a mass. Taken to a firmer, more thoroughly drained stage it is panir, which is most often added to sauces in sliced or cubed form after a light browning in ghee or oil.

In India, the curd for chhenna and panir is usually coagulated with citrus juice or commercial citric-acid crystals. There are various other possibilities, including whey saved from a previous batch, sour whey drained from yogurt, or yogurt itself. (Vinegar would also do the job, but it is scarcely used in any Indian region but Goa.) Since judging necessary amounts of whey or yogurt takes some experience, I have given directions using only lemon or lime juice. You can easily double the recipes, using the ratio of 2 tablespoons juice per quart of milk. Whole milk (homogenized or unhomogenized) gives the best results.

YIELD:
About 8 ounces (1 cup) chhenna, 7 cups whey

Pour the milk into a heavy-bottomed 4-quart saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring to keep the bottom from scorching. When it starts boiling up in earnest, remove from the heat and promptly strain the lemon or lime juice into the milk, stirring it in gently. The milk should rapidly separate into clouds of white curd in a sea of greenish-yellow whey. (If this doesn’t happen, add another spritz of juice.) Let stand for 8 to 10 minutes.

Line a strainer or colander with tight-woven cheesecloth or other clean cotton cloth, set it over a deep bowl, and use a skimmer or shallow ladle to carefully lift out the larger clumps of curd into the cloth. Very gently pour in the whey with the remaining curd.

Let drain for a few minutes. Tie the corners of the cloth into a bag. Holding the bag by the tied corners, briefly rinse the curd under cold running water to remove a little of the lemon taste. Gently squeeze the bag in your hands to press out some of the water. Now you can either hang it up to drain further until it is a little softer than cream cheese (usually about 1½ to 2 hours; suspend it on the kitchen faucet or a wooden spoon set over a deep bowl) or speed the process as follows: Flatten the bag of curd into a rough disc or rectangle, put it on a plate, and cover it with another plate. Place a weight (a heavy can, a couple of large beach pebbles) on the top plate and let stand for about 30 minutes, periodically draining off any overflow. It can then be used as is, but will be easier to work with if you cream it with a large wooden spoon in a bowl or with the heel of your hand on a flat work surface. Imagining that you are creaming butter for a cake or putting a
pâte brisée
through the stage called
fraisage,
work
the cheese very, very smooth a little at a time. If you are not using it at once, pack it into a container and refrigerate, tightly covered. It is extremely perishable and should be used within 3 to 4 days.

YIELD:
About 8 ounces panir, 7 cups whey

Follow the directions for chhenna to the stage of draining or pressing. The cheese should now be drained for 4 to 5 hours or pressed for 1 to 2 hours, until firm enough to be cut with a knife. Shape it into a block roughly 4 by 4 inches and cut into approximately 1-inch cubes with a heavy sharp knife. It will be both firmer and more flavorful with a quick browning: Heat the ghee in a heavy medium skillet, either nonstick or very well seasoned (panir sticks tenaciously to most pan surfaces). Add the cubes of panir and cook, stirring and turning constantly, until they are golden brown on all sides. Scoop out of the hot fat to drain on paper towels until cooled to room temperature. Store as for chhenna and plan to use within 3 to 4 days.

T
his is a name that I have never really figured out. “Kofta” refers to meatballs or meatball-shaped things like dumplings and croquettes. “Malai” ought to indicate that thick cream is involved, but many dishes labeled “malai kofta” haven’t a smidgin of cream. Be that as it may, Indian restaurants in this country regularly attach the name to a vegetarian dish of meatless croquettes in a creamy sauce with Mughlai touches—that is, real or fancied borrowings from the Moghul conquerors of India, usually including nuts and sweet dried fruits. The versions I like best are based on chhenna, the slightly moister cousin of panir. Usually the cheese is bound with potatoes or chickpea flour and shaped around a dab of fruit and nut filling before being dipped in a simple batter of chickpea flour and water and deep-fried in oil or ghee.

The sauce is made separately and can take many different forms. I’m partial to one with onions, cream, yogurt, and a mixture of
finely ground nuts—this last closely copied from the “Fragrant Masala with Nuts” in
Neelam Batra’s inexhaustibly rich
1,000 Indian Recipes.
It is complex enough to be best made in stages.

YIELD:
About 4 large servings as a vegetarian main dish

To make the sauce, remove the seeds from the cardamom pods. Put the cardamom seeds, cinnamon, peppercorns, and cloves in a small heavy skillet and roast over medium-low heat, stirring, until the spices are fragrant but not scorched. Remove from the heat and let cool slightly before grinding everything to a fine powder in an electric coffee or spice grinder.

Put the nuts in the same skillet and roast over medium-low heat, stirring frequently, until they are fragrant and lightly browned. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature before grinding to a powder in a mini–food processor. Combine the ground spices and nuts in a small bowl and set aside. (This nut masala mix can be prepared a week or several days ahead; store in the refrigerator, tightly covered.)

Mince the ginger, chiles, and garlic together almost to a paste. Heat 3 tablespoons of the ghee or oil until fragrant and rippling in a deep heavy skillet. Add the cumin, mustard seeds, and curry leaves and cook, stirring, for a few seconds. Add the minced ginger mixture, and let it sizzle briefly before you add the onions. Cook, stirring frequently, over medium-high heat until the onions are softened, about 15 minutes.

Let everything cool slightly and process to a coarse paste in a blender or food processor. Add the tomatoes and nut masala, and process briefly.

Rinse out and dry the skillet. Add the remaining 1 to 2 tablespoons ghee or oil, and heat over medium-high heat until fragrant and rippling. Add the sauce, which should sizzle vigorously. Cook, stirring frequently, until you see the fat beginning to separate from the sauce, 20 to 25 minutes.

Remove from the heat and let cool. The sauce can be prepared to this point several hours ahead and reheated while the croquettes are being fried. If you have any leftover fruit and nut filling, add it to the sauce in reheating.

For the croquettes: Make the chhenna and work it smooth; see
this page
.

Coarsely chop together the nuts, raisins, and optional dried apricots.

Boil the potato until tender in plenty of salted water; peel while still warm, and grate the flesh on the coarse side of a box grater. Add the potato and ½ to 1 teaspoon salt to the chhenna and work it with your hands into a soft dough.