Priya Makes Saag Feta

[Man] And let's pick it up with a transition.

Oh, shit.

Oh. [man laughs]

That's great. Sorry,

I just love the smell of ghee.

[people laugh]

My bad. [laughs]

[Man] Next video.

Yeah. [laughs]

[Man] Priya puts some ingredients up her nose.

[laughs]

[upbeat, bright music]

I just got copy number one of my cookbook, Indian[-ish].

Do you want me to... [laughs]

It comes out April 23rd.

This is the cover in which my mom

is depicted as Rosie the Riveter.

But, instead of we can do it, it's You can cook it,

done by Maria Qamar, my favorite illustrator.

So yeah, we're gonna make one of the dishes

out of this cookbook today, spinach and feta cooked

like saag paneer.

You may or may not have heard of saag paneer.

It's a very standard takeout staple.

It's basically a dish of paneer,

which is a type of Indian cheese cooked

in a spiced spinach gravy, and that's been pureed.

But we're doing something a little bit different.

Instead of using paneer, which you totally can use

in this recipe, we are going to use feta.

It's briny, salty, Greek cheese.

It crumbles easy.

I could literally eat blocks of this stuff,

so we are making a version with that,

which my mom made the discovery when we went to Greece,

that feta and spinach go together perfectly,

and feta does this wonderful job of adding this briny,

salty element to an aromatic spinach gravy.

Man, there's a lot of Peanut Gallery today.

[man talking indistinctly in background]

[chuckles quietly] It's just a little bit more interesting

than a standard saag paneer,

and it's one of the most well-loved dishes in our house.

First thing we're gonna do is,

many Indian dishes start with chopping an onion.

So we're just gonna chop this into a half-inch dice.

This is going in the blender, so don't obsess too much

about doing a perfect chop.

People always ask me do you de-seed your chilies.

I never do.

I feel like this is one chile in the entire dish.

You can handle it, trust me.

We've chopped our onion, we've chopped our chile.

We're gonna take everything over

to the stove and prep our sauce.

So we're gonna heat this up on medium heat,

and we're gonna add our ghee.

So you can use ghee or olive oil.

I much prefer ghee 'cause it has this really rich,

nutty taste to it.

You can also use butter, but that has a little bit

of a higher burning point, so this is just easier.

All right, so we're gonna put our ghee, about 1/4 cup here.

So ghee is basically just clarified butter.

All you need to do to make ghee

is melt a stick of butter in a pan,

wait for this foamy, white stuff to appear on the top,

and then either strain it out with a spoon

or put it through a cheesecloth, and you've got ghee.

All right, first we're gonna add our spices.

We've got coriander seeds, which are nice and earthy,

and then we've got our green cardamom pods.

And the best part about this is that you don't have

to do any grinding with this because you're gonna end

up blending this in the blender anyways,

so you can add the spices whole.

Just a cardinal rule in Indian cooking

is that you always want to toast your spices.

That's really how you're getting the maximum aroma

and flavor out of them.

If you're not toasting your spices, oftentimes,

you're getting a more like bitter, weirdly earthly flavor.

But as soon as you toast them,

it releases those natural oils,

and it's gonna taste really good.

There's nothing better

than just smelling ghee melting in a pan.

Can you smell it from over there?

So you see now the coriander seeds

are browning a little bit; that's what you're looking for.

That means they've toasted.

You're just looking for a medium shade of brown.

Now we're gonna add our onion in.

So we're cooking the onion now until it turns translucent.

The key is you want to make sure they're coated in the ghee

and then you spread them out in a layer like this

and leave them be.

The bottom will get a little bit charred,

and you're getting the most of that oniony flavor.

You're getting the sweetness, you're getting the charness.

That's how the complexity builds.

So yeah, this is going for a few minutes.

Okay, onion's looking good.

We're gonna add our ginger and garlic.

Ginger, garlic, and onion are essentially the Holy Trinity

of much of Indian cooking.

If you start with onion, ginger, garlic,

you can put anything there, and it'll taste very good.

Cook this for about a minute.

You're just looking for the ginger

and garlic to get coated in the ghee.

Once you start smelling it, can you, ghee, garlic, ginger.

Now we're gonna add our spinach, about a pound of spinach.

This looks like a lot, but it will wilt down.

I try to add it in little bunches and then let it wilt,

add another bunch, let it wilt.

You're not looking for it to be completely dead.

You want it to have some of its green flavor,

but you do want it to wilt

'cause that'll make it easy to blend.

So we're gonna let this cool down.

[bangs spoon against pan]

I'm gonna first add our chile, roughly chopped,

a little bit of lime juice.

You can add more or less depending on how tangy

an aesthetic you like things, and then teaspoon of salt.

And then, before we put it in the blender,

we're just gonna let it cool down for a little bit.

All right, so here's my tip about feta,

which is that you wanna buy it in block form like this.

You don't wanna buy it crumbled

in those little packets that you get at grocery stores.

When you get it in these big blocks,

it dries out less easy, especially if you get it packed

in brine, which is the salty water

that gives feta its wonderful flavor.

I'm gonna do cubes 'cause it looks the most similar

to saag paneer.

So paneer is a type of Indian cheese.

I guess it's similar to if you were

to just press ricotta together into a firm block.

It doesn't really have much of a taste to it,

but it's got a lot of texture,

and it absorbs sauces really well,

which is why it works well in Indian cuisine

where there's a lot of vegetarian cooking

and you want something that'll really soak

up the flavors of all those spices.

What I would say is that I like saag paneer,

but I love saag feta.

Something that I truly dread is transferring things

from a pan to a blender.

Is there anything worse?

Is there some trick that I'm missing

about transfer from pan to blender?

This is just--

[Rhoda] Like a cup measurement.

With a cup measurement?

[Rhoda] There's some in the drawer if you want.

Let's try it.

[bangs spoon against pan]

'Cause usually I'm literally just like...

It's just a very awkward, an awkward move.

Let's try it.

We'll try, okay.

[Rhoda] There's a cup right there in your top drawer.

Oh, there is? Yeah.

[Priya] Ah ha!

Oh, my God.

[Rhoda] It's not gonna [speaks indistinctly].

All right, let's try it.

Let's see.

Oh, yeah.

[bangs cup against blender]

Hot tips from @rhodaboonefood.

Okay, so blending this spinach,

you are not looking for baby food.

You want something that is somewhat homogenous

but still has some sort of flecks of spinach in it.

You don't wanna taste it

and just taste the exact same thing.

You wanna taste little bits of spinach.

So we're gonna blend it but not too much.

[blender whirs]

All right, so this is the consistency you're looking for.

See how it's got some little spinach flecks?

All right, I'm just gonna taste this.

It's really good.

One thing to keep in mind is

when you're tasting this for salt,

you're gonna be adding feta later,

and that's feta's going to salt the dish.

So you don't want this to be too salty

because you're adding another salty component.

Mmm, that's really good.

Now we're gonna go over to the stove.

We're gonna add our spinach gravy, water, feta,

and then we're gonna finish everything off with some chonk.

There we go, on low heat.

One of my mom's tricks for getting it

out of the blender is to put a little bit of water,

swirl it around, and then add it back in.

So I'm gonna do that, and then I'll add more water to this.

You're basically just looking for something

that is a mixable sauce like this,

something you can beautifully swirl your spoon in.

So now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna fold in the feta.

Be very gentle.

You just want the sauce to coat the feta really nicely

and beautifully without breaking apart the feta.

I'm gonna let that cook on low heat for a couple minutes.

Basically, what you're looking for is for the feta to bake

into the sauce a little bit but to not completely melt.

That's how the feta's gonna absorb all

of those amazing, complex flavors of the gravy

and make something that's just extremely delicious.

[bangs spoon against pan]

And in the meantime, maybe we can make our chonk.

Chonk time?

[timer beeps] It's chonk time.

It's chonk time.

People ask with this recipe why

are you adding the ghee and then the spices twice?

You do it in the beginning and then you do it at the end.

Why can't I just combine this all into one step?

And the thing is you're looking to layer the flavors.

We have our spinach gravy infused

with that wonderful coriander and cardamom

and with the herbaciousness of the spinach,

and now we're gonna hit with this nutty richness

of the ghee, the earthiness of the cumin seeds,

the heat of the red chili powder,

and then, of course, our asafoetida,

which I don't think we've used in the test kitchen yet.

I would like to think of it as the Indian MSG,

this mystical powder

that makes Indian food taste more Indian.

If you ever eat an Indian dish and you're like,

what's that lip-smacking, cravable flavor?

More often than not, it is [speaks in foreign language].

So you're gonna heat this on medium high.

So remember, you're working really quickly

when you're making a chonk.

This happens really fast, and if you get distracted,

you will burn your spices, so work quickly and carefully.

So we add our ghee.

As soon as this melts and turns transparent,

we'll add our cumin seeds.

As soon as you start to see the cumin seeds dancing around

like this, as soon as they're doing a little jig in the pan,

that's usually when they're about ready.

I'm gonna let them dance around a little more.

They're going like this, and you want them to be like...

That's when they're ready.

And then we're gonna immediately add in paprika,

cayenne, whatever red chili powder you have, either works,

and then a pinch of [speaks in foreign language].

A little [speaks in foreign language] goes a long way.

Do not treat this like any other spice.

And then as soon as this is done,

you're gonna pour it over the top.

This is what I love about this dish

is that I love the way the chonk glistens

and forms these pockets of fat in the spinach gravy.

So we're gonna carefully scoop this.

Wow, this smells really good.

I think I'm gonna have it with both rice and roti,

if that's cool.

I think that the pro move here

is to fill a bowl with some rice,

then put some of your saag feta on top of that,

eat all that, then use the roti

to sop up the remains and clean your bowl.

So we're just gonna mound up some rice.

How much rice is too much rice?

[Man] Is there such a thing?

I don't know if there's such a thing.

Oh, I feel so bad piercing this beautiful chonkofied thing.

[Man] Chonkofied.

[Priya] Chonkofied.

[Man] Chonkified [speaks indistinctly].

You can make chonk into a adverb, a verb.

It can be anything you want it to be.

Mmm.

Holy cannoli.

I almost said a curse word, but I didn't.

Oh, man.

There is just the supreme difference that feta makes,

just the way that it melts in your mouth.

You do not get that with paneer.

Paneer is amazing, don't get me wrong,

but feta, it literally melts in your mouth.

The feta just melts onto your tongue

with this salty, briny, funky flavor.

And then, on top of that, you have a really,

really good spinach gravy.

Say if somehow maybe you mess up your spinach gravy,

you're just throwing your chonk over the top.

So on the top, you've got your nutty, fatty ghee mixture,

and it's just layers of things that, how could you go wrong?

Mmm.

You will not find feta cooked like saag paneer in India.

It's one of those distinctly Indian-American dishes,

but I think that's what makes it so wonderful.

Immigrants come to this country, they can't find

all the ingredients that they're looking for,

they find substitutes, and beautiful,

new discoveries are made.

Feta cooked like saag paneer; that's exactly what it is.

It might be sacrilege to put feta in saag paneer,

but if loving feta cooked like saag paneer is wrong,

I don't wanna be right.