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Family Meal

Palak Paneer Quiche

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Patrick Coue

Palak Paneer is a popular vegetarian dish originally from Northern India. It is a staple on the menu of Indian restaurants abroad. Its two main ingredients, palak (spinach) and paneer (a compact, mild, non-melting cow’s cheese), are cooked with various spices. The often-puréed cooked spinach gives the dish a smooth and silky texture, contrasting with the sautéed cubes of paneer, crispy on the outside and soft inside. Saag Paneer is the big sister recipe.  It is more or less the same recipe but instead of palak, a wide range of leafy greens can be used depending on seasonal availability. Mustard greens and collard greens are common ingredients but kale, Swiss chard, beet leaves, arugula and also dandelion and watercress or even chrysanthemum leaves can be considered.

For quite some time, my spouse and I have been attempting to bridge our own culinary traditions, respectively French and Indian. The idea came about when my spouse suggested that we experiment with the texture, form and presentation of Indian dishes. Indian food is by default our everyday cuisine for it offers a wide range of vegetarian dishes. For me, it is also a constant source of exploration of the world of spices and legumes. I recall a casual dinner conversation that might have been the impetus for this experimentation. My spouse had been intrigued by a recipe, I believe by Ferran Adrià, then the pope of molecular gastronomy, which deconstructed the popular chicken tikka masala dish. This particular recipe epitomized the playful and infinite possibilities of 1990s gastronomic alchemy. In this new version the textures were reversed. The chicken became the sauce and the masala the solids. It got us thinking that this play on texture could be apply to other Indian dishes such as palak paneer.

Palak Paneer like many Indian dishes is served alongside rice or flatbread (roti, naan etc.), and more often than not in combination with other dishes. For many of us who enjoy Indian food but might not want to or cannot prepare an entire Indian meal, a Palak Paneer quiche satisfies two requirements. First the dish retains the traditional ingredients of the Indian recipe, and second its firmer and drier structure turns (the traditional recipe is wet, think thick potage) turns it into a stand-alone dish that can be served as an appetizer or a main course.  The crust replaces the rice.

If you don’t have access to paneer, other non-melting cheeses such as queso fresco, queso blanco or halloumi are great substitutes. For those who are cutting down on dairy products or would like to make a vegan version, a firm tofu also works very well. The spice level can also be modulated to your taste. You can make the quiche filling as mild or spicy as you like.  If you make your own quiche dough, you can throw in a teaspoon of dry roasted cumin, powdered or whole seeds, with the flour to add extra zing to the crust.

The only real challenge is to make the filling fairly dry and compact by not pureeing the spinach and by not adding cream to the mixture like in the traditional recipe at this stage of the preparation.

Palak Paneer Quiche

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Ingredients

  • Oil for greasing pan
  • Flour, as needed, for dusting quiche pan
  • Unsweetened pie crust for a 23 cm (9-inch) tart pan or a frozen pie shell*
  • 227 to 340 grams (8 to 12 ounces) paneer cheese or any other non-melting mild cheeses (queso blanco, queso fresco, halloumi) or well-drained firm tofu (preferably high-protein tofu, with less water so denser)
  • 30 ml (2 tablespoons) ghee, clarified butter, butter or unflavored vegetable oil
  • 10 ml (2 teaspoons) ground cumin
  • 2.5 ml (½ teaspoon) ground coriander (optional)
  • 15 ml (1 tablespoon) minced garlic
  • 15 ml (1 tablespoon) grated ginger
  • 156 ml (2/3 cup) small-diced onion (yellow, Spanish, Vidalia or red)
  • 454 grams (1 pound) fresh spinach** or about 850 grams (30 ounces) frozen chopped or whole spinach or any green leafy vegetables
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 5 ml (1 teaspoon) red chili pepper or cayenne pepper
  • 7.5 ml (1 ½ teaspoons) ground turmeric
  • 2 small diced fresh or canned tomatoes
  • 5 ml (1 teaspoon) garam masala
  • 3 large eggs
  • 473 ml (2 cups) heavy cream
  • 7.5 ml (1 ½ teaspoons) salt

*If using a frozen pie shell, read the cooking instructions. Some need to be precooked.

**Any green leafy vegetables, fresh or frozen, may be used. If using fresh leaves, after washing, separate the stem from the leaf. Finely chop the stems. Put aside. You can also choose to skip this task and keep the stems to make soups or stocks. Chop the leaves. You don’t want to have long strings or big chunks of leaves, which would make the cutting of the quiche difficult and messy.

Preparation

  1. Regardless of whether you are using a homemade or store-bought crust, grease and lightly flour the quiche pan. Line the mold with the rolled-out dough about .3 cm (1/8-inch) thick. I like to raise a bit of dough (about .2 or 1/6 inch) above the rim of the mold to avoid spillage. Firm up the dough in the fridge for half an hour or in the freezer for few minutes.

2. Cut the cheese or tofu into small cubes about .6 cm (¼-inch). Sauté the cubes in hot oil in a large sauté pan until they acquire a light blond color on several sides. Remove them with a slotted spoon and reserve.

3. Add a bit of oil to the sauté pan if none is left. Add the cumin and coriander, if using, to the hot oil and stir over medium of less than a minute. Then add onions and sauté them until translucent. Then add the garlic and ginger. Stir. (At this point you have the option of adding the chopped stems and cooking them until tender; you can cover the pan the pan with a lid and lower the heat to soften the stems for about 5 minutes.) Add bay leaves, red chili and turmeric. Stir for a couple of minutes, then add the tomatoes. Stir until the tomatoes are cooked, about 5 minutes on low-medium heat.

4. Add the chopped spinach. Stir. Add 5 ml (1 teaspoon) of the salt and cook until tender. Depending on the thickness of the leaves, cover the pan with the lid. Remove the lid and let liquid evaporate toward the end of the cooking. The mixture should be fairly compact without excess liquid. Add the garam masala. Stir. Let cool.

5. In a bowl, combine the eggs, heavy cream, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt; whisk until blended. Once the palak mixture is cool, fill the chilled pie crust 2/3 up the rim of the mold. Distribute the mixture evenly and pack it lightly. Uniformly distribute the cheese or tofu cubes on the surface of the spinach mixture. An approximate .6-1.2 cm (¼-inch to ½-inch) spacing around them has proven to be satisfactory, but there is no real rule here.

6. Preheat an oven to 200°C (390°F). Place the quiche on a baking sheet. Slowly pour the egg-heavy cream custard almost to the top, leaving .3 cm (1/8-inch) space below the top rim of the dough. Make sure that the custard has time to infiltrate the spinach mixture. You can use a fork and gently poke holes between the cubes to help the custard mix with the spinach.

7. Bake the quiche for 20 minutes, 20 minutes, then lower the heat to 177°C (350°F) and bake for another 20 min. If you had to prebake the crust, this cooking time might be shorter. The visible part of the crust should be dry and slightly colored. Add a few minutes of baking time if the crust doesn’t seem cooked or if the top of the quiche doesn’t have a nice light brown color. Let cool a bit on a rack before serving.

Tips:

  • If using tofu cubes instead of cheese — if this is not intended to be a vegan dish — you can sprinkle some grated cheese on top of the custard.
  • The egg custard has some salt and can hold up to additional seasonings. If you decide to add some cumin or turmeric or red chili powder, dry roast and sauté the spices in a little bit of oil before adding them to the mixture. It is a staple of Indian cooking to sauté spices to liberate their aroma and avoid a raw taste.
  • If you have leftover spinach mixture, add a bit of heavy cream, ricotta or plain yogurt (approximately 15 ml/1 tablespoon of dairy for 1 cup of spinach mixture) and savor it the traditional way with plain rice or flat bread. Alternatively, you can make crustless quiches with the leftover spinach (approximately 1 egg and 118 ml (1/2 cup) of cream for 237 ml (1 cup) of spinach mixture). Here you can fold in the quiche batter with the spinach and pour mixture into a small gratin dish or ramekins.
  • The spinach-spice mixture can be made ahead of time and stored, refrigerated, for up to 2 days.
  • The quiche freezes well. Defrost it overnight in the fridge then reheat in a 93°C (200°F) preheated oven for about 15/20 minutes.

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Patrick Coue

Patrick Coue is the founder of https://www.voyageactually.com/, a native of France, and an avid professional traveler for three decades.

He grew up in the country outside of Nantes, close to the Atlantic Coast (a culturally mixed border region between Brittany and the Loire Valley). For many years he lived in Paris, in Marseilles, in Montpellier, on the French Riviera in Cannes and in Metz, in Eastern France.

Patrick went to restaurant school when he was a teenager and worked in restaurants as a chef in Brittany, Paris, and in the South of France.

He holds the coveted French National Tour Guide Card (Guide-Interprète National), the official certification in France to allow him to legally serve as a guide throughout the country in sites and museums.

While guiding groups around the world (USA, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and India, to name a few), he decided to pursue graduate studies in Art History at the University of Delaware. He went on to teach college level Art History and Culinary Arts. He is best known for his popular class, called “The Visual Culture of Food” that exposed students to the history of food and evolution of taste through the lens of art history.

Read more from Patrick Coue

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