The Art of Cooking with Feta: A Guide to Making SOG Feta

When it comes to cooking with feta, one of the most important things to keep in mind is being gentle. You want to coat the feta really nicely and beautifully without breaking apart the feta. To achieve this, let the sauce cook on low heat for a couple of minutes. This will allow the feta to bake into the sauce slightly, but not completely melt. The result is a dish that showcases the creamy texture of the feta as it absorbs the complex flavors of the spinach gravy.

One question that often arises when cooking with this recipe is why add the key and then the spices twice, like in the beginning and then at the end. The answer lies in layering the flavors. By doing so, we can create a dish that's full of depth and character. In the beginning, we infuse the spinach gravy with coriander and cardamom, which adds an herbaceous note to the dish. Then, just as we're about to serve, we add the nutty richness of ghee, the earthiness of cumin seeds, and the heat of red chili powder. This creates a harmonious balance of flavors that's both exciting and unexpected.

Another key element in this recipe is the use of asafoetida, also known as Indian MSG. This mystical powder adds a unique flavor that's often described as lip-smackingly good. It's not uncommon for people to wonder what makes Indian food taste so distinctively Indian, and the answer lies in ingredients like asafoetida. So, when you're cooking with this recipe, be sure to add the asafoetida immediately after the spices have melted.

When working with chunky ingredients, it's essential to work quickly and carefully. If you get distracted, you risk burning your spices, which can completely ruin the dish. To avoid this, heat the mixture on medium-high heat and carefully add the cumin seeds once they start to dance around in the pan. This is usually when they're ready, as they'll have started to sizzle and release their fragrance.

The addition of paprika, cayenne, or red chili powder adds a touch of heat to the dish, but remember that a little heat goes a long way. Don't overdo it – you want to maintain the delicate balance of flavors in your SOG feta.

Once the mixture is complete, pour it over the top of your spinach gravy and let it simmer for a few minutes. This will allow the flavors to meld together and the sauce to thicken slightly. The result is a dish that's both savory and satisfying.

One of the best things about this recipe is the way the chunks add texture and visual interest to the dish. As you take a bite, the chunky mixture glistens with fat and forms pockets on your tongue. It's truly delightful!

When it comes to serving, one of the pro moves is to fill a bowl with rice, top it with the SOG feta, and use roti to scoop up the remaining sauce. This not only adds texture but also allows you to appreciate the different components of the dish in harmony. And let's be real – there's no such thing as too much rice when it comes to this recipe!

Finally, don't underestimate the power of using feta instead of paneer in a traditional Indian dish like saag paneer. The result is a unique twist on an old favorite that showcases the creamy texture and salty flavor of feta. It may be sacrilege to some, but loving feta cooked like saag paneer is not wrong – it's just deliciously innovative!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh sorry I just love the smell of ghee my bad I just got copy number one of my cookbook India nish do you want me to like 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 comer my favorite illustrator so yeah we're gonna make one of the dishes out of this cookbook today spinach and feta cooked like sod clear 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 the type of Indian cheese cooked in a spiced spinach gravy and that sort of 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 its briny salty Greek cheese it crumbles easy I could literally eat blocks of this stuff so we were making a version with that which my mom sort of made the discovery when we went to Greece that feta and spinach go together perfectly and feta does this wonderful job of adding this like briny salty element to an aromatic spinach gravy man there's a lot of peanut peanut gallery today 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 going to do is most 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 deseed your Chili's I never do I feel like this is one chili in the entire dish like you can handle it trust me we've chopped our onion we've chopped our chili we're gonna take everything over the stove and prep our sauce so we're gonna heat this up on medium heat and we're gonna add our key so you can use ghee or olive oil I much prefer key because it has this really rich taste to it you can also use butter but that has a little bit of like a higher burning point so this is just easier all right so we're going to put our ghee we've got a quarter cup here so ghee is basically just clarified butter all you need to do to make ki is melt a stick of butter in a pan wait for this like 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 key alright 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 anyway 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 sort of more like bitter like weird weirdly earthy flavor but as soon as you toast them it's sort of releases those natural oils and it's gonna taste really good there's like nothing better than just like smelling key melting in a pan can you smell it from over there so you see now these the coriander seeds are kind of browning a little bit that's what you're looking for that means they've toasted you're just looking for like 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 key and then you spread them out in a layer like this and leave them be like the bottom will get like a little bit charred and you're sort of getting the most of that oniony flavor you're getting the sweetness you're getting the char Ness that's sort of how the complexity builds so yeah this is going for a few minutes okay onions looking good we're gonna add our ginger and garlic ginger garlic and onion are essentially like the Holy Trinity of much of Indian cooking if you start with onion ginger garlic you can kind of put 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 key once you start smelling it can you like sort of 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 like little bunches and then let it wilt add another bunch let it wilt you're not looking for it to be completely like dead you want it to have some as green flavor but you do want it to wilt because that'll make it easy to blend so we're gonna let this cool down I'm gonna first add our chili roughly chopped a little bit of lime juice you can add more or less depending on how taking in acidic 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 want to buy it in block form like this you don't want to buy it crumbled in those little like 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 sort of like the salty water that gives feta it's wonderful flavor I'm gonna do cubes because it sort of looks the most similar to to Assad funnier so paneer is a type of Indian cheese I guess it's similar to like 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 an absorbed 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 SOG feta something that I like truly dread is transferring things from a pan to a blender like is there anything worse is there some like trick that I'm missing about transfer from pan to blender like this is just with a cup measurement let's try it because usually I'm literally just like like it's just like a very awkward I'm awkward move let's try it aha oh my god alright let's try it let's see oh yeah top tips from at Rhoda bean food okay so blending the spinach you are not looking for baby food you want something that is somewhat homogeneous but still has some sort of flecks of spinach in it like you don't want to taste it and just taste like the exact same thing you want to taste like a little bits of spinach so we're gonna blend it but not too much all right so this is the consistency you're looking for see how like it's got some little spinach flecks all right I'm just taste this it's really good um one thing to keep in mind is when you're tasting this for salt you're gonna be adding feta later and that feta is going to salt the dish so you don't want this to be too salty because you're adding another salty component not 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 chunk there we go on low heat one of my mom's tricks for getting out of a 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 looking for something that is um mixable sauce this something you can like beautifully swirl your spoon in so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna fold in the feta be very gentle you kind of 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 like a couple for a couple minutes basically what you're looking for is for the feta to kind of like baked into the sauce a little bit but to not completely melt that's how the feta is gonna absorb all of those amazing complex flavors of the gravy and make something that's just extremely delicious and in the meantime maybe we can make our chok chok time it's chopped time people ask if this recipe like why are you adding the key and then the spices twice like you do in the beginning then you do the end why can't I just combine this all into one step and the thing is you're looking to sort of layer the flavors like we have our spinach gravy infused with that wonderful coriander and cardamom and with the sort of herbaceous nests of the spinach and now we're gonna hit it with this sort of like 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 it's sort of like the I would like to think of it as like the Indian MSG this sort of like mystical powder that makes Indian food tastes more Indian if you ever eat an Indian dish and you're like what's that sort of like lip smacking like craveable flavor more often than not it is heme so you're gonna heat this on medium-high so you're working really remember you're working really quickly when you're making a chunk like this happens really fast and if you sort of get distracted you will burn your spices so work quickly and carefully so we add our deep as soon as this melts and sort of turns transparent we'll add our cumin seeds as soon as you start to see the cumin seeds kind of dancing around like this as soon as they're like 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 sort of like 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 chilli powder you have either works and then a pinch of heat a little heat goes a long way do not treat this like any other spice and then as soon as it's done you're gonna pour it over the top so you can kind of like this is kind of what I love about this dish is that like I love the way the chunks sort of like glistens and forms these like pockets of fat in a 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 SOG feta on top of that eat all of that then use the roti to sort of stop up the remains and clean your bowls so we're just gonna mount it up some rice how much rice is too much rice I don't know if there's such a thing oh I feel so bad like piercing this beautiful like choco fide thing Chaka v you can make chalk into an adverb a verb it can be any it can be anything you want it to be holy cannoli I almost said a curse word but I didn't know ma'am there is just the supreme difference that feta makes just like the way that it just melts in your mouth you do not get that with paneer paneer is amazing don't get me wrong but feta it's sort of it like literally melts in your mouth like the feta just like melts onto your tongue with this like salty briny funky flavor and then on top of that you have a really really good spinach gravy if somehow maybe you mess up your spinach gravy you're just like throwing your chunk over the top so on the top you've got your like nutty fatty ki mixture and I mean it's just like layers of things that like how could you go wrong you know you will not find feta cook like saag paneer in India it's one of those like distinctly Indian American dishes but I think that's what makes it so wonderful like you know immigrants come in this country they can't find all the ingredients that they're looking for they find substitutes and like beautiful new discoveries are made that I cook like saag paneer that's exactly what it is it might be sacrilege to put feta in saag paneer but what is it if loving feta cooked like saag paneer is wrong I don't want to be rightoh sorry I just love the smell of ghee my bad I just got copy number one of my cookbook India nish do you want me to like 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 comer my favorite illustrator so yeah we're gonna make one of the dishes out of this cookbook today spinach and feta cooked like sod clear 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 the type of Indian cheese cooked in a spiced spinach gravy and that sort of 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 its briny salty Greek cheese it crumbles easy I could literally eat blocks of this stuff so we were making a version with that which my mom sort of made the discovery when we went to Greece that feta and spinach go together perfectly and feta does this wonderful job of adding this like briny salty element to an aromatic spinach gravy man there's a lot of peanut peanut gallery today 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 going to do is most 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 deseed your Chili's I never do I feel like this is one chili in the entire dish like you can handle it trust me we've chopped our onion we've chopped our chili we're gonna take everything over the stove and prep our sauce so we're gonna heat this up on medium heat and we're gonna add our key so you can use ghee or olive oil I much prefer key because it has this really rich taste to it you can also use butter but that has a little bit of like a higher burning point so this is just easier all right so we're going to put our ghee we've got a quarter cup here so ghee is basically just clarified butter all you need to do to make ki is melt a stick of butter in a pan wait for this like 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 key alright 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 anyway 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 sort of more like bitter like weird weirdly earthy flavor but as soon as you toast them it's sort of releases those natural oils and it's gonna taste really good there's like nothing better than just like smelling key melting in a pan can you smell it from over there so you see now these the coriander seeds are kind of browning a little bit that's what you're looking for that means they've toasted you're just looking for like 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 key and then you spread them out in a layer like this and leave them be like the bottom will get like a little bit charred and you're sort of getting the most of that oniony flavor you're getting the sweetness you're getting the char Ness that's sort of how the complexity builds so yeah this is going for a few minutes okay onions looking good we're gonna add our ginger and garlic ginger garlic and onion are essentially like the Holy Trinity of much of Indian cooking if you start with onion ginger garlic you can kind of put 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 key once you start smelling it can you like sort of 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 like little bunches and then let it wilt add another bunch let it wilt you're not looking for it to be completely like dead you want it to have some as green flavor but you do want it to wilt because that'll make it easy to blend so we're gonna let this cool down I'm gonna first add our chili roughly chopped a little bit of lime juice you can add more or less depending on how taking in acidic 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 want to buy it in block form like this you don't want to buy it crumbled in those little like 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 sort of like the salty water that gives feta it's wonderful flavor I'm gonna do cubes because it sort of looks the most similar to to Assad funnier so paneer is a type of Indian cheese I guess it's similar to like 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 an absorbed 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 SOG feta something that I like truly dread is transferring things from a pan to a blender like is there anything worse is there some like trick that I'm missing about transfer from pan to blender like this is just with a cup measurement let's try it because usually I'm literally just like like it's just like a very awkward I'm awkward move let's try it aha oh my god alright let's try it let's see oh yeah top tips from at Rhoda bean food okay so blending the spinach you are not looking for baby food you want something that is somewhat homogeneous but still has some sort of flecks of spinach in it like you don't want to taste it and just taste like the exact same thing you want to taste like a little bits of spinach so we're gonna blend it but not too much all right so this is the consistency you're looking for see how like it's got some little spinach flecks all right I'm just taste this it's really good um one thing to keep in mind is when you're tasting this for salt you're gonna be adding feta later and that feta is going to salt the dish so you don't want this to be too salty because you're adding another salty component not 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 chunk there we go on low heat one of my mom's tricks for getting out of a 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 looking for something that is um mixable sauce this something you can like beautifully swirl your spoon in so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna fold in the feta be very gentle you kind of 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 like a couple for a couple minutes basically what you're looking for is for the feta to kind of like baked into the sauce a little bit but to not completely melt that's how the feta is gonna absorb all of those amazing complex flavors of the gravy and make something that's just extremely delicious and in the meantime maybe we can make our chok chok time it's chopped time people ask if this recipe like why are you adding the key and then the spices twice like you do in the beginning then you do the end why can't I just combine this all into one step and the thing is you're looking to sort of layer the flavors like we have our spinach gravy infused with that wonderful coriander and cardamom and with the sort of herbaceous nests of the spinach and now we're gonna hit it with this sort of like 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 it's sort of like the I would like to think of it as like the Indian MSG this sort of like mystical powder that makes Indian food tastes more Indian if you ever eat an Indian dish and you're like what's that sort of like lip smacking like craveable flavor more often than not it is heme so you're gonna heat this on medium-high so you're working really remember you're working really quickly when you're making a chunk like this happens really fast and if you sort of get distracted you will burn your spices so work quickly and carefully so we add our deep as soon as this melts and sort of turns transparent we'll add our cumin seeds as soon as you start to see the cumin seeds kind of dancing around like this as soon as they're like 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 sort of like 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 chilli powder you have either works and then a pinch of heat a little heat goes a long way do not treat this like any other spice and then as soon as it's done you're gonna pour it over the top so you can kind of like this is kind of what I love about this dish is that like I love the way the chunks sort of like glistens and forms these like pockets of fat in a 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 SOG feta on top of that eat all of that then use the roti to sort of stop up the remains and clean your bowls so we're just gonna mount it up some rice how much rice is too much rice I don't know if there's such a thing oh I feel so bad like piercing this beautiful like choco fide thing Chaka v you can make chalk into an adverb a verb it can be any it can be anything you want it to be holy cannoli I almost said a curse word but I didn't know ma'am there is just the supreme difference that feta makes just like the way that it just melts in your mouth you do not get that with paneer paneer is amazing don't get me wrong but feta it's sort of it like literally melts in your mouth like the feta just like melts onto your tongue with this like salty briny funky flavor and then on top of that you have a really really good spinach gravy if somehow maybe you mess up your spinach gravy you're just like throwing your chunk over the top so on the top you've got your like nutty fatty ki mixture and I mean it's just like layers of things that like how could you go wrong you know you will not find feta cook like saag paneer in India it's one of those like distinctly Indian American dishes but I think that's what makes it so wonderful like you know immigrants come in this country they can't find all the ingredients that they're looking for they find substitutes and like beautiful new discoveries are made that I cook like saag paneer that's exactly what it is it might be sacrilege to put feta in saag paneer but what is it if loving feta cooked like saag paneer is wrong I don't want to be right\n"